Restrictive Covenants

How They Worked

In general, restrictive covenants were created by neighborhood associations and attached to properties throughout the geographic area governed by the neighborhood association, once a required percentage of the property owners, often 75%, had signed on. Given widespread racial prejudices and fears in U.S. cities in the early to mid-20th century, and the all-White population of the neighborhoods where restrictive covenants were proposed, it was often quite easy to get the required percentage of property owners to sign on.

Restrictive covenants covering entire neighborhood areas did not exist before the 20th century, though individual deed restrictions forbidding sales of properties to members of specified groups did. However, these earlier deed restrictions did not have the same impact as the restrictive covenants that came later because they applied only to individual properties, rather than entire neighborhoods. With the restrictive covenant, which began to come into common use after 1910, minority groups could be excluded from entire neighborhoods, not just individual properties. The adoption in the early 20th century of restrictive covenants excluding African Americans and other minorities from entire neighborhoods is one important reason why U.S. cities experienced a substantial increase in racial housing segregation between about 1910 and 1940, by which time most cities were much more segregated than they had been a half-century earlier.

Restrictive covenants were effective in restricting the housing opportunities of minority group members for one reason: Until 1948, they were recognized as legally enforceable and were backed up by the courts. In both the North and the South, state courts enforced restrictive covenants by ordering buyers or renters in groups banned by the covenants to surrender ownership or occupancy of their property. Without this legal backing, restrictive covenants would have been meaningless; with it, they were an important mechanism of housing discrimination, backed by the full legal force of the state.

In addition to this critical legal support, the U.S. government encouraged the use of restrictive covenants in other ways. The Federal Housing Administration, for example, discouraged the “infiltration of inharmonious racial and national groups” and “the presence of incompatible racial elements” in neighborhoods in its policy manuals from 1935 to 1950—and, for a time, it backed this up by including a sample restrictive covenant with a blank to fill in the name of the unwanted group or groups. In fact, even as many as 2 years after racial restrictive covenants were ruled unenforceable by the Supreme Court, the FHA continued to use a recommendation developed in the late 1940s encouraging the use of restrictive covenants as way of protecting neighborhood security.

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