Restrictive contracts and actions designed to keep black residents away from white communities cannot be enforced today, but their lingering presence still causes pain and anger.
Restrictive contracts and actions designed to keep black residents away from white communities cannot be enforced today, but their lingering presence still causes pain and anger.
Real estate records in the Chicago area are full of racist language from the past
From Auburn Gresham to Hyde Park on the south side of Chicago, to Logan Square on the north side, to the suburbs of Highland Park and Glenview, in the decades of the 20th century, white homeowners A racist but legal clause was added to the property.
"Houses cannot be sold, rented or transferred to people of African descent."
"Restriction of any part of the above premises shall not be used or occupied by any black or black people directly or indirectly.... Except for the employed servants, janitors or drivers..."
"Shall not be transferred, leased or occupied by anyone who is not white."
The race restriction contract and the contract are legally binding documents used from 1916 to 1948. These documents are attached to plots or districts to prevent blacks, usually people from other races or ethnic groups, from living in or buying real estate. Covenants and behaviors were enforced in cities across the country—but they were cultivated in Chicago. In 1948, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that they were not enforceable, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968 declared them illegal.
Despite their proliferation, it is difficult to find restrictive contracts in county records. WBEZ has publicly called for help in positioning this language, asking people to upload their family’s files as a way not to be ashamed, but to consider the history of racist housing in our area.
WBEZ is working with the Newberry Library to ensure that all documents used in the project are properly preserved. Want to add to the collection?
Check your records or your family's records for paperwork about your property.
Look for parts that restrict who can buy or live in the home.
If you find examples of restricted language, please use this form to send us a digital copy of the document.
The uploaded content includes: the deed of a woman in the home of Polish grandparent Auburn Gresham in 1948; the deed of the house purchased in Hyde Park by the former in-laws of the current owner in 1946, and the documents found by the current owner in the documents left by the former owner Deed of Park Ridge in 1956.
WBEZ also spent a few days looking for records in the basement of the Cook County Clerk Office. The multi-step process is laborious because the records are not digitized. This is a master class to unravel the red tape. You flip through a few thick property books, search file cabinets and sort through handwritten ledgers before you might find keywords such as "race restriction." You fill out a slip of paper with documents and page numbers to obtain a microfilm of the records or request documents from the warehouse where the records are stored.
When Dave Wigodner and his wife bought his North Shore Highland Park house in 1983, he was unaware of the restrictive contract that came with it.
Four years later, the couple refinanced and discovered this while digging through paperwork, and discovered this in the 1926 deed: "The house cannot be sold, rented or transferred to people of African descent."
Wigodner, a retired white architect, said he "felt offended and offended." He contacted a lawyer and asked to delete the language, but the lawyer told Wigodner not to worry because the lawyer's fees would be expensive and the contract could not be enforced anyway.
Nevertheless, the language of the contract still troubled Wigodner, but he gave up on it. The children are born. Some things were added to the house, it became an artistic and craftsman style, and the dining room has a huge bay window with a view of the park next door.
In recent years, he has read seminal works by journalists and scholars on housing segregation. He listened to Englewood artist and activist Tonica Johnson talking about her series of folded maps of apartheid in Chicago. Wigodner's wife told him of WBEZ's public appeal for restrictive behavior, and he was pleased to submit it.
"Knowing that limitations are bothering me here. But I don’t know how to deal with or solve it. It just feels wrong and hits me emotionally in this way. Obviously, over the years, I haven’t become a man early enough. Activist," Wigodner said.
He volunteered on local community development issues and joined the Housing Committee to support subsidies and affordable housing in Highland Park-where the median family income is $150,000.
This summer, Governor JB Pritzker signed a bill allowing homeowners to remove racist language from property deeds. The law went into effect in January.
Wigodner said that he and his wife will delete their language-but they will not stop talking about racist behavior, because this is part of history and should not be hidden.
The contract date was 1926, when no black people lived in the suburbs. In 1930, the black population of Highland Park was 1.5%. By 2000, it had risen by 0.3%. The most famous black resident of the suburb was once Michael Jordan. Today, only 0.8% of the residents of Highland Park are black.
Of the 19 records submitted to WBEZ, most of them represented suburbs, which is surprising because they were written before the whites flew and the federal government established the interstate highway system to spread the red carpet to the white suburbs. Southern Negroes who ventured to Chicago during the Great Migration did not seek to settle on the North Shore. However, the covenant exists there.
Raddell Winlin, a historian who teaches at Virginia Tech, said: "This is to comfort potential buyers or assure them that even though it is clear that no African Americans live here now, we assure you that they will not in the future. live here."
Winling discovered that many real estate developers in the early 20th century advertised in Chicago newspapers promoting their new homes in cities and suburbs. In the 1920s, many advertisements marked these developments as restrictive. This is a kind of bragging, just like the en-suite bathroom with rain shower in the real estate listing today.
When I saw the restrictive contract on the contract,...I was frightened. In 1959, I started to study the people who signed the contract, and there were still restrictive contracts in the contract. It was illegal when it was signed in 1959. It was illegal when it was written in 1926-but it didn't stop it from happening. ...My destiny has a restrictive contract that feels like a shameful secret.
We discovered the contract at the end of the transaction... [and] I tried to violate it as much as possible. My marriage ended, and I raised and eventually adopted three non-white children. ...I have about a quarter of Jews/Ashkah Jews, and I believe this is also forbidden by the covenant. I hope the original owner will turn over in the grave!
I found these records...it was like, "Oh, my goodness." In a way, I was not surprised by the date and time and the situation at the time, but just put it in black and white or red. Putting the white and white form there and applying it to my house, I was really surprised and thought, "Oh, but it fits well."
Frederick H. Bartlett was one of the leading real estate developers in the early 20th century. He developed in Wigand where he lived in Highland Park. According to scholar Wendy Plotkin, he included racial restrictions in the 3,000 districts near Chicago Roseland.
Desmond Odugu and his students at Lake Forest College found local suburbs under restrictive deeds and put them all online for public digital projects. By the 1940s, Cook County had 220 districts with restrictive contracts.
"If you look at the legal history of racial restrictions and how it fits in with the Great Migration, and then look at the propaganda that followed—I know very well that many parts of this country, even though they don’t have many blacks, But they are already aware of the threat of bringing these people...come nearby," Odougou said.
Odougou connects the racist contract with the current housing landscape and the gap between rich and poor in black and white races. But Odougou, a Nigerian, says he also connects this history with the broader history of global imperialism.
"Chicago or the United States are not unique in the use of land, displacement and deprivation as tools for exercising power," Odougou explained. "As for the system, legal system, and economic system of the nation-state itself, it was originally designed as part of the exploitation process. We have never really raised serious or deep enough questions."
Of course, many past ethnic housing policies have shaped the face of today’s suburbs. Many white wealthy suburbs in the area are struggling to maintain the ethnic and economic homogeneity of the community. Not through behavior, but through exclusive zoning to shut out affordable housing.
"Chicago or the United States are not unique in the use of land, displacement and deprivation as tools for exercising power."
Today, the suburban Glenview has a six-figure income and 1.5% of the black population. It also has ethnic restrictions.
Doug McCarthy’s parents bought a house in Glenview in 1967, and 30 years later, he saw the title certificate, which read, “The residential purpose of the land can only be used for racial servants other than Caucasians.”
Although the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that contracts were not enforceable 20 years ago, it did not prohibit them. The Fair Housing Act of 1968 made these restrictions illegal. McCarthy said he didn't know whether his parents knew the deed when they bought the house, but everyone was surprised when his family saw it years later. His parents are dead, and McCarthy uploaded the file to WBEZ. But he has questions about whether his mother deleted the language.
"Emotionally, I am a little sad to think of this happening recently. All I can think of is that we need to work hard to ensure that this language is eliminated in the future," McCarthy said.
Restrictive behavior and covenants were the precursors to the red line and other racist housing policies that affected segregation in the Chicago area.
"The way in which contracts dominated and used in the first half of the 20th century was the result of real estate developers working in cities facing large migrations of new immigrants," said Wen Lin, a historian at Virginia Tech. He is writing a book on various racist real estate practices. He is also a researcher at the Newbury Library, which is holding documents that we have discovered and received from the WBEZ public solicitation.
When southern blacks immigrated to Chicago a century ago, they were restricted to black belts. Many people migrated to escape violence, but Jim Crow in the north welcomed them. Winling refers to the contract as a bloodless legal mechanism.
The National Association of Real Estate Boards is headquartered in the city, and Chicago has played a role in the widespread use of deeds not only locally but also throughout the country.
"This is a bit like a communication center for ideas, or like a nerve center, where you can concentrate and accumulate ideas about real estate practices, and then send them to various boards and branches across the country," Wen Lin said.
In 1917, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that local governments could not explicitly establish ethnic zones as in apartheid South Africa. But ten years later, another Supreme Court case maintained a restrictive contract on property. The general counsel of the Chicago National Real Estate Council created a contract template to convey the following information to real estate agents and developers:
"No matter where you are, Peoria, Wichita, Spokane, Tacoma, San Francisco, Philadelphia, you should use this template in your community. So we see that in 1926 and 1927 After the creation of the model contract in 2009, the use of the contract was standardized and then strengthened," Winling said.
The counties deal with land records, and there are more than 3,000 counties across the country. Millions of deeds are attached to property across the United States. It is impossible to quantify how many of these legally binding documents cover the Chicago area. The white community associations and owners organized for them often pay $5 to sign their names on the contract.
In 1999, the scholar Plotkin wrote a paper on race contracts-a comprehensive analysis of these housing restrictions. She discovered that the first wave of covenants recorded in 1928 and 1929 occurred in communities near the "Black Belt": Kenwood, South Oakland, Hyde Park, Woodlawn, South Bank, Grand Crossing, West Englewood, and Englewood . In addition, some deeds were found on the south and north sides of 87th Street-West Town adopted them. In the 1930s, they spread to the West End of North Lawndale and East Garfield Park.
"Another theme that emerged from this research is that despite the passionate rhetorical promise of democracy, the city’s white people have the ability to rationalize racial discrimination on an economic basis. The perception of property value and the ethnic composition of the community The close connection between the two provides a compelling reason for the residents to sign the contract. Many people did not try to reconcile their economic interests with the democratic principles that are said to be behind the American political system, but merely believed that the contract was an expression of democratic autonomy. What is lacking is the leadership of communities, cities, and nations, who use the same motivation to find solutions to protect economic interests and racial opportunities and rights."
African Americans do not accept second-class citizens.
In 1940, Carl Hansberry (Carl Hansberry) won a US Supreme Court lawsuit questioning the restrictive deed of a house purchased by his family in the White West Woodlawn community. A white neighbor named Anna Lee opposed the purchase. The Hansbury family prevailed, but only technically-not enough white people signed the contract. These documents can be ordered in the basement of the Cook County building. This experience inspired her daughter Lorraine Hansberry, who was 8 years old when their family moved there. Her groundbreaking play "Raisins in the Sun" tells about a black family who wants to move to a white community and faces boycotts from white neighbors.
Earl Dickerson, a prominent black lawyer who defended the Hansbury case in the U.S. Supreme Court, was labeled communism by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover . Lawyers and civil rights organizations argue that the contract is not a simple private contract, but a tool to maintain apartheid, which is a social evil. In 1945, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People held a restrictive contract meeting in Chicago with lawyers from all over the country.
Ninety years ago, due to my skin color, I could not live in my apartment-unless I was a janitor, driver or housekeeper.
I live in a beautiful brick wallless building in Chicago's Hyde Park Lakeside neighborhood, which is covered by a contract. Our 3,000 square foot apartment is located on the top floor, and the front solarium and the rear sunroom are flooded with light. Obviously, the current restaurant used to be the maid’s dormitory, right next to the bathroom in the hall.
Today, the community is hailed as a bastion of intellectualism and integration. But some Hyde Parks played an ugly role in the ugly part of Chicago's housing history. At that time, Hyde Park was afraid of black invasion because of its proximity to the black belt. But Hyde Park is whiter and richer, and is the home of the University of Chicago — with the resources, money, and united community associations to prevent black residents from entering.
As a race and housing journalist, I know that these contracts exist. But seeing an actual document proved to be harsher than I thought. On the day I found it in the basement of Cook County, I came home that night, and when I was cooking dinner, anger washed over me. I stood in the kitchen and knew that the only way I could occupy that space decades ago was to cook for a white family. My experience of life in apartheid in Chicago has jumped to another level.
"90 years ago, because of my skin color, I could not live in my apartment-unless I was a janitor, driver or housekeeper."
A few weeks later, I rang the landlord’s doorbell and talked to him about the contract on his building. James Williams is a quiet and elegant person. He is a retired school administrator. He likes jazz and classical music, just like I was two levels higher in hip-hop music in the 90s.
He didn't know that the building he bought in 1971 had a contract. But what I learned is even more amazing. Williams is a symbol of the great migration and a victim of racist housing policies. His family moved from Alabama to Chicago so that his mother could work in a tank factory in Ford City during World War II.
Williams and his parents live in a black belt apartment with a kitchenette. The neighborhood is narrow, so the landlord cut the building into small apartments to accommodate newcomers. The family cooks, eats and sleeps in one room. When Williams was in high school, the family bought a two-story apartment in Parker Manor in the Southern District.
The U.S. Supreme Court’s 1948 ruling on the unenforceable contract opened up many southern white communities, such as Park Manor, to black families. The failure of the contract led to the escape of the whites. Within ten years, some communities in the Southern District went from almost all white to almost all black.
Williams said that decades later, after his mother's death, he found documents showing that the house was protected by the racial convention. I asked him if he had any white neighbors.
"There are a few. But they leave as quickly as possible-so much so that I almost say I don't remember where they were," Williams said.
Park Manor is very special to me. The WBEZ Southern District Office is located on 75th Street. In 1980, my grandparents bought two apartments near No. 72 and the grassland. During my visit to the Cook County building, I found a deed covering these two properties.
But I am not the only WBEZ staff member who found personal contact with the contract in the basement of Cook County. My editor Alden Loury rented a piece of greystone near North Kenwood, not far from me, with beautiful interior woodwork. Laurie discovered the deed for the property.
"It hit me in a way I didn't expect to be. Seeing this language really makes me feel that these things are tangible. I think at that moment, it really shocked you, wow-this is people I felt it strongly, they wrote it on paper. They took it as a legal document and made it clear that I cannot live here, unless we serve as a domestic servant, otherwise my family cannot live here," Lori Say.
Once a data master, he used census records to find the owner and found that the family was immigrants from the Netherlands and lived there in 1930. We will never know if this family understands what they signed on the dotted line, which includes a restrictive contract. But many immigrants from Europe did it. This is how they get white people not only in Chicago but also in the United States.
The research contract made Lori more respect for what his great-grandparents endured when they immigrated to Chicago decades ago.
"They endured, they survived, and in some cases even thrive. I just think it's really incredible considering the obstacles or restrictions they face," he said.
Laurie and I live in a census area that was once white, and the black population is more diverse. We are able to choose our rental location without the obstacles that black Chicagoans once faced. Although the covenant is a relic of the past, face-to-face with their language reminds us of the long-standing legacy of racial discrimination in Chicago and the pain it still causes.
Natalie Moore is a reporter at the WBEZ Race, Class and Community Help Desk. Follow her on Twitter @natalieymoore.
WBEZ's temporary audience participation producer Libby Berry led the community to solicit this story. Follow her @libbyaberry. Katherine Nagasawa and Penny Hawthorne contributed.
Special thanks to WBEZ Media Archive Manager Justine Tobiasz, LaDale Winling and Newberry Library for their work in preserving the files collected for this project.