While the history of redlining and its impact on American cities has received due attention in recent years, contemporary observers have tended to overlook a similarly widespread practice: the encoding of racially restrictive covenants onto property deeds. The community-driven project Hacking into History (HiH) has, since 2020, sought to rectify this by narrating the impact of racial covenants in Durham, North Carolina. Alexandra Chassanoff, assistant professor at UNC School of Information and Library Science and a member of the HiH team, provides the following framing for their project:
Over the last five years, a number of research projects have begun to engage with historic archival documentation to explore this phenomenon, which has taken place in most American cities throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Though no longer enforceable by law, the covenants provide evidence and a through line along which to trace the ways race has been routinely weaponized in order to construct and enforce white supremacy. The digitization of these formerly analog records provide a kind of witnessing—an evidence to their use as instruments of social control.
Like other forms of infrastructure, race becomes visible when the systems in which it is embedded break down. Locating the operational role that covenants played within local and regional systems of power is one means of prompting regenerative paths forward. Each set of restrictive covenants introduces us to how specific neighborhoods, parks, cemeteries, and other landmarks have been used as proxies to achieve exclusionary goals in community life. They also provide opportunities to reflect on how the visibility of race has, in many ways, been used opportunistically within these systems.
For example, the quaint university town of Chapel Hill, nine miles from Durham, is a significantly smaller, whiter, and wealthier town. Chapel Hill experienced population growth later than Durham, and volunteers who have studied the town’s deeds argue that despite a relatively higher percentage of deeds with less explicitly racist language, Chapel Hill’s housing restrictions—by way of minimum required lot sizes, house sizes, and housing costs—were designed to block Black families from residing in certain of its neighborhoods. They also demonstrate how race can become an activating force when convenient. This is part of what scholar Wendy Chun has called “the how of racism” and what we hope our project, in conjunction with others across the United States that comprise a National Covenants Research Coalition, can illuminate through discussion and comparison. The impact of covenants and redlining are still very visible in Durham today—in the selection of areas for development and of which neighborhoods continue to be protected; in the fact of whose children grow up near garbage incinerators, and continue to play in contaminated parks. These are legacies of racism with a paper trail. HiH uses these records to provide evidence of and to instigate discussion around the long history of exclusionary restrictions—to problematize and counter the effects and impact of gentrification in the city as an economic development strategy.
Finally, in making covenants available for public examination through communities of practice meetings and workshops over the last four years, HiH holds space for intentional public witnessing, reckoning, and discussion. Grounding conversations about the deeds in ways that explicitly avoid white comfort at the expense of further Black trauma, the project encourages people to begin to process their initial discomfort through somatic approaches. HiH challenges the removal of covenants from property deeds—a move currently pursued by multiple states and legal intermediaries. When covenants are removed, so is the evidence of an underlying story to be told. As archival studies tells us, this absence makes it possible to wrongly ascribe our social and economic differences to concepts like meritocracy rather than to the impacts of structural racism. Documentation can be used to make sense of the world and to be able to imagine otherwise while also understanding how systems of power function through cultural legitimization structures such as “history” and “archives.” This project asks: What might it mean to resist these clean narratives and to use the work of community building as a way to regenerate towards new possibilities?
In the following conversation, Logic(s)’ Puck Lo unpacks the impacts of racial covenants with HiH’s Alexandra and James “JT” Tabron, assistant register of deeds at Durham County.
Puck Lo: Alex, you’ve worked as a digital archivist, and currently you’re a professor teaching archival studies. JT, you are an assistant register of deeds. Could you both talk about how you got involved with Hacking into History?1
Alexandra Chassanoff: In 2010, I worked as a graduate research assistant on a project aimed at creating a digital collection for the redlining of neighborhood surveys and maps housed at the National Archives.2 That experience was really eye opening to me about the kinds of documents that aren’t part of the national story. Fast-forward several years later: John Killeen—my former neighbor and the executive director of DataWorks NC—and I were discussing covenants after hearing about similar work happening at the University of Minnesota Library.3 So we talked with JT at the Durham County Register of Deeds office.
James “JT” Tabron: I manage the real estate division at the Register of Deeds office. My office is seventy feet away from the room where we keep these records in heavy-duty, plastic-bound books, and they’re right there in black-and-white print. For a while, I never really stopped to think that those were there. But you wonder why some communities look the way they do as compared to other ones, why governments seem to invest more in some places than others, why police may harass certain locations more than others.
Puck: I’m curious about the materiality of the plastic-bound books, these documents. Could you talk about that?
JT: This is a government office. These things were all facilitated by the government. You look at the realtors who showed the houses. You have lawyers who write, rewrite, and copy these covenants and the legal documents, and then you’ve got the police that enforce them and the courts that enforce them. You don’t have to make great leaps to see how all these things are connected, and it’s right here in print in these books. No one with Negro blood can live here unless they’re a domestic servant.
Alexandra: Many American cities have these deeds. But to locate the specific covenants is really intense. When they’re in this physical paper form, it’s not like, I know where the racial covenants are, I just have to find the book.
JT: Real estate records are not generally filed by address. There are other organizing categories, like a legal description or a parcel ID or PIN number. Deed documents show ownership; a restrictive covenant is a clause that can either be tucked into a deed or stand alone. Restrictive covenants are clauses that say what somebody can or can’t do with a property. Racially restrictive covenants are going to be tied in among other covenants. You might see a deed with ten clauses—one might say, “You can’t have farm animals in your yard,” and another one might say, “You can’t build a building this high.” You’ll have six or seven of those, but then clause eight will be, “If you’re Black, you can’t live here.” It’s almost flippant how they just toss that in with everything else. Durham has digitized all of its land records back to 1881, so you’ve got thousands of records to trawl through. Alex, you can talk about how long you think this would have taken if we didn’t have access to machine learning. But basically, it enabled us to pull those documents and sift through them by looking for key terms.
Alexandra: Initially, the county scanned deed books to make electronic copies, but didn’t use optical character recognition, which makes text searchable. Our colleague Tim was like, “Let’s load all these up on an Amazon Web Services server, and I can run a machine learning tool on them.” We picked out a couple of keywords, like “Negro blood,” that were clear identifiers. But like with all machine learning stuff, you had to differentiate between references to white people versus white oak trees in the descriptions. That’s where the human validation part of our project came in. We wanted to crowdsource that part—we had over 150,000 records with the potential to contain racially restrictive covenants. And we loaded those into a crowdsourcing platform called Zooniverse and held community workshops for the better part of four years.4
JT: What we’re describing is a title search. You do this legwork of reverse-engineering the ownership chain, and it’s tedious. When people buy houses now, they get title insurance, and they get a lawyer to do it. It’s such an arduous but important task that there’s insurance involved—in the event that somebody messes up or misses something, because it can be so problematic. That just speaks to the amount of work involved.
Puck: Some people fixate on the deed itself—the paragraph—and it’s like, You’re missing the point. This is an index of generations of ongoing violence that is systemic and purposefully hidden from view. What gives value to land and property in the United States is racial violence. It’s the forcible removal of peoples of color and their replacement by white people.5 There’s even a calculation that was made: the government decided that the western frontier would be closed when there was one white body per two square miles.6 It was that specific—no pigs in the yard, no nonwhite people in the house, you know?
JT: One of the things that we found looking through the documents is that a lot of them contain a clause that says: “It runs with the land.” Restrictive covenants can go into perpetuity. If there’s an addition that states “running with the land,” that means that the covenant terms continue on even after a property is sold. Our colleague, Tia Hall—who facilitates a lot of the somatic work in our sessions—makes the point that you can acquiesce with something even if you’re not actively participating in it. If you have communities around Durham where people are like, “I don’t have any restrictive covenants on my property; I don’t have anything to do with that.” But all of your neighbors do; that is going to assign some level of value—to your point, Puck—to your land. And if the prevailing sentiment of the time—coming from the federal government and the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation—is that a property without certain types of people is more valuable than this other land where those people are; it just feeds into the point that you’re making, right? This valuation of land based on who’s there.
What gives value to land and property in the United States is racial violence.
Puck: Can you talk about the crowdsourcing aspect of the project?
Alexandra: We launched in spring 2020. The original project was supposed to be in-person workshops where we use the covenants to engage people and teach them about the history of covenants. And then suddenly, we were all in this Zoom world, so the crowdsourcing platform made sense for carrying the project forward. It took us four years to get through all of the transcriptions. We had hundreds of thousands of deeds that had to be reviewed and validated by multiple volunteers.7
At our workshops we would give an introduction, then we’d spend thirty minutes doing transcription and validation, and then we’d ask people, “What is your reaction?” There have been a range of reactions, but I would say there is often a physical one, which is one of the reasons why having a community facilitator who uses somatic approaches has been groundbreaking. Tia asks people, “When you see the covenant itself and you see these words, ‘No one of Negro blood is allowed to live here,’ where do you feel that?”
A lot of white people come to our workshops that want to “solve” the problem by removing the covenant. So as a project team, we’ve actually changed our focus. We’ve come to realize that seeing the language is a very powerful and important experience that is terrible, but also not something that we can just wipe away. We stand with it as a kind of witnessing.
JT: I think that when people’s worldviews are expanded with this type of information, it makes them uncomfortable. Some people talk about a tightness in their chest or their head starts to hurt or they feel sick to their stomach. So the response may be, “Well, how do we get rid of this?” But there are light bulb moments. I remember an older white lady. She told a story about how when she was younger, her parents, when they would drive around town, would take the long way home. And her parents would tell her, “We don’t want to go through that part of town, because these people live here.” She wasn’t able to conceptualize the inhumanity that her parents had been conditioned with that made them think that way—that we need to avoid these people, that there’s nothing we can learn from them, that they don’t have anything to offer; that their area doesn’t have any value, so we need to just circumnavigate that.
We’ve come to realize that seeing the language is a very powerful and important experience that is terrible, but also not something that we can just wipe away.
Puck: That’s a spatial story. That’s a story about people moving themselves in accordance with the world they built, right? And what determined value? If we’re looking at property law, it’s based on a worldview that said: we’re going to pull from the discovery doctrine, which gave European white countries the right to fight over supposed new territories and colonize them.8 I feel like that a-ha moment for that person, it’s like the body moving through time, having this realization that’s bigger than the moment itself. This is historical trauma, and it’s ongoing. We can’t move forward, because of trauma; we keep playing out the sources of our pain. We have to literally reenact this, and then we have to deconstruct it, start from scratch. There’s something in this process that you all put together that does that. You have current inhabitants bearing the weight of this history by sorting and recategorizing and witnessing, like you’ve said, the lineage of this violence.
Alexandra: Not a lot of people that I know of are using somatic responses to do this kind of historical reckoning. It’s one of the most unique things about our project in Durham, because there are other projects examining covenants in cities all over the country.9 Some are focused on getting laws passed to get these covenants removed. Whereas our project is like, we want you to feel.
We have the archival receipts, and we want you to engage with the receipts and sit with them. They’re very uncomfortable, but we can only grow if we acknowledge those receipts.
We have the archival receipts, and we want you to engage with the receipts and sit with them.
1. “Hacking into History,” 2024, hackingintohistory.com.
2. Records of the Federal Home Loan Bank Board,, October 11, 2024. archives.gov.
3. “Mapping Prejudice,” n.d., mappingprejudice.umn.edu.
4. Zooniverse is an online, free platform for citizen science projects and crowdsourcing transcription efforts: zooniverse.org.
5. K-Sue Park,“Race and Property Law,” Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works 2405 (2021), 4–5.
6. Department of the Interior, Census Office, Compendium of the Eleventh Census, 1890 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1892).
7. The Hacking into History project analyzed 162,160 deeds, written between the 1880s and 1962, to identify those deeds that likely contained racial covenants. From the mid-2020 through spring 2023, over 300 volunteers reviewed and transcribed racial covenants, completing over 10,000 classifications. The project page, officially retired in 2024, can be found here: https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/tim-maps/hacking-into-history.
8. Park, “Race and Property Law”
9. “National Covenants Research Coalition,” n.d., National Covenants Research Coalition, nationalcovenantsresearchcoalition.com.