Wake County maps 14,500 racist housing covenants. Here’s what to know

A new searchable map from the Wake County Register of Deeds reveals more than 14,500 racially restrictive covenants embedded in property records from 1900 to 1950. The interactive tool shows how housing discrimination shaped neighborhoods across the Triangle — and continues to influence them today.

FULL STORY: Wake’s 14,000 red dots: See a century of housing restrictions on new searchable map

Here are key takeaways:

• The Racially Restrictive Covenants Project catalogued more than 14,500 covenants after nearly three years of work. Residents can type in any address to see whether a property or surrounding parcels contain discriminatory language.
• Although the Supreme Court ruled such covenants unenforceable in 1948 and the 1968 Fair Housing Act outlawed them, the offensive language still exists in hundreds of deeds across the county. Nearly every race-restricting deed also imposed religious exclusions, most commonly targeting Jewish residents.
• Volunteers used artificial intelligence and optical character recognition to scan roughly 600,000 pages of archived records. The earliest covenant found dates to 1906 and barred occupancy by “negros or persons of negro blood” except domestic workers.
• The office has documented its methodology so other communities can replicate the process. Similar research in Washington state led to the Covenant Homeownership Account Act, which compensates victims of restrictive covenants.

The summary points above were compiled with the help of AI tools and edited by N&O journalists. The full story in the link at top was reported, written and edited entirely by N&O journalists Chantal Allam and Dave Hendrickson.

Chantal Allam

The News & Observer

919-829-4522

Chantal Allam covers real estate for the The News & Observer and The Herald-Sun. She writes about commercial and residential real estate, covering everything from deals, expansions and relocations to major trends and events. She previously covered the Triangle technology sector and has been a journalist on three continents.