About
The Project
For much of the 20th century in the United States, the system of white supremacy was partly maintained by discriminatory housing policies. In Washington State, thousands of residential properties included legal covenants barring certain racial minorities from owning the property. Though these racist property restrictions were struck down by the Supreme Court in 1948 and outlawed entirely in the 1968 Fair Housing Act, they remain on the books in official documents in many Washington counties.
In 2021, Washington State passed SHB 1335, Concerning Review and Property Owner Notification of Recorded Documents with Unlawful Racial Restrictions, which assigned Eastern Washington University and the University of Washington with the task of finding all of the racially restrictive property covenants in the state and informing owners about how to mitigate them. EWU is proud to be involved in correcting this historic wrong.
Eastern Washington University is locating the racially restrictive property covenants in the 20 counties of eastern Washington. It is a big job, involving everything from using optical character recognition of digitized files to slowly turning the pages of huge bound volumes of deed books. Our team includes historians, records experts, and student researchers. Working closely with the University of Washington team, we are excavating a long-buried past.
As of June 2024, we have nearly completed the work of finding the relevant property documents and are moving into mapping the individual counties. We anticipate completing all of the county maps by the end of the year.
The Team
- Dr. Larry Cebula: Executive Managing Director of the Eastern Washington Racial Covenant Team
- Dr. Tara Kelly: Project Director of the Eastern Washington Racial Covenant Team
- Dr. Stacy Warren: Lead Mapping Expert of the Eastern Washington Racial Covenant Team
- Logan Camporeale: Senior Consultant of the Eastern Washington Racial Covenant Team
- Monique Baxter: Assistant Mapping Expert of the Eastern Washington Racial Covenant Team
- Rachael Low: Research Assistant of the Eastern Washington Racial Covenant Team
- Dr. Josué Estrada: Senior Consultant of the Central Washington Racial Covenant Team
- Ulysis Cruz-Antonio: Research Associate
- Sean Riley: Research Assistant
- Andres Galvez-Preciado: Research Assistant
- Alex Cordon: Research Assistant
- P. Colin Manikoth: Web Designer and Developer
Contact
Do you have questions or would you like to join us? Contact EWU Project Director Dr. Tara Kelly at tkelly12@ewu.edu