New website maps out history of housing segregation in DC
A new website, Mapping Segregation, seeks to illuminate DC’s history of racially restrictive housing covenants from the last century that continue to define the city’s segregation patterns today.
The site is the brainchild of DC historians Mara Cherkasky and Sarah Shoenfeld, founders of Prologue DC, a private historical research firm. They started the mapping project in 2014, and officially debuted their website at an Oct. 24 event at The George Washington University Museum and The Textile Museum.
Cherkasky and Shoenfeld believe that DC’s modern segregation — a few years ago, FiveThirtyEight found the city to be the nation’s sixth most segregated — can be traced back clearly to the restrictive covenants that real estate developers and white citizens groups used to control neighborhood demographics in first half of the 1900s.
Before they were rendered unenforceable by the Supreme Court in 1948 and illegal in 1968 by the Fair Housing Act, deed covenants between property sellers and buyers specified who was allowed to buy a house the next time it was for sale, generally prohibiting black ownership but sometimes barring Jews as well. For example, when then-Sen. John F. Kennedy bought a house in Georgetown in 1957, a provision in the deed, though unenforceable, specified that the house should not “ever be used or occupied or sold, conveyed, leased, rented, or given to Negroes or any person or persons of the Negro race or blood.”
Petition covenants had a similar effect, but originated with neighborhood groups. Associations would circulate petitions and effectively put a restrictive covenant on the house of every signee, a practice effectively endorsed in a 1926 Supreme Court decision. “The Petworth Citizens Association brought lawsuits to uphold racial covenants and, in at least one case, purchased a property without a covenant to prevent its being sold to a black buyer,” says an article on the website about “How Racially Restricted Housing Shaped Ward 4.”
Mapping Segregation currently features three online exhibits: a walking tour of Bloomingdale’s restrictive past, a slideshow of documents illustrating the District’s mid-century racial transformation, and a detailed story map showing demographic change in the city block by block. That map currently provides a limited amount of data, but thanks to a grant from HumanitiesDC (known formally as the Humanities Council of DC), the team is planning to map the entire city.
“Private developers were allowed to define the racial landscape of the city through racial covenants,” Cherkasky said. The new website, she suggested, helps illuminate these patterns in a very tangible way: “If a picture tells a thousand words, a map can tell stories no words can tell.”
The Mapping Segregation project has also received funding from the National Park Service and the DC Preservation League.
“It couldn’t be more timely,” Greg Squires, a sociology professor at George Washington University, said of the site. “We need the kind of facts and evidence that this project and others show, so when the day comes we will be able to move forward.”
Squires appeared on a panel at the site’s launch event last month, along with Amanda Huron, an associate professor at the University of the District of Columbia, and Natalie Hopkinson, a writer and cultural scholar.
“The website is just the tip of the iceberg of all the research that they’ve done,” Huron said of Cherkasky and Shoenfeld’s work. “They are really doing public scholarship that is for the people of this city.”
In their discussion last month — moderated by WAMU reporter Sasha-Ann Simons — the scholars grappled with DC’s past and present trends of segregation, displacement and gentrification.
“We’re more segregated today than we were 100 years ago, and it’s because of a combination of these public policies and private practices,” Squires said. “The most vicious and perhaps the most effective social engineering you’ve ever seen is the way we created segregated communities throughout the 20th century.”
Huron pointed out that family homelessness is still a persistent problem in the District and that nearly 6,000 children in the city’s public and charter school systems are homeless. “We have some of the best tenant’s rights laws on the books of any city in the United States. That said, we still see enormous waves of gentrification and displacement, so that tells us what a stiff problem we’re up against here,” she said.
Hopkinson noted that blockbusting and neighborhood flipping — once-commonplace techniques used by Realtors to proactively induce white flight and gentrification — have consistently been a boon for the real estate industry, though they are now considered unethical. “I think the reason why it’s happening is that it was profitable back then [and] it’s still profitable right now,” she said.
Still, panelists agreed that the District’s newfound desirability to developers could empower residents and provide them with more leverage.
“There’s a window of opportunity right now because people do want to come to DC,” Squires said, noting that grassroots groups like Empower DC and ONE DC are able to push for developers to include public amenities in their projects. “Now is when you can extract concessions,” he said.
Hopkinson noted that progress on desegregation would depend on cooperation from the city government and real estate industry. “[We] have some opportunities to do things better than we have,” she said. “And I don’t know that we’re seizing those opportunities.”
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