Mapping Segregation
in Washington DC
Auction of 136 Adams Street NW, 1941
Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard Univ.
Petworth, late 1920s
Library of Congress
DC Public LIbrary
Charles Hamilton Houston, 1931
Scurlock Studio Records, Archives Center, National Museum
of American History, Smithsonian Institution
The Neighbors, Inc. Records
DC Public Library
Sign advertising new subdivision, 1930
DC Public Library
Used with the permission of the Baltimore Afro-American
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Mapping Segregation
in Washington DC
From Restrictive Covenants
to Racial Steering
A Special Exhibit on
the Fight for Fair Housing in Washington DC
Legal Challenges to Racially Restrictive Covenants
Race and Real Estate in Mid-Century DC: The Neighbors Inc. Records
This exhibit was launched in 2018 to mark the anniversaries of several milestones in the history of
fair housing.
May 3, 1948. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Shelley v. Kraemer that the enforcement of racially...
restrictive deed covenants was unconstitutional. Attorney Charles Hamilton Houston argued and
won a DC companion case, Hurd v. Hodge.
November 1948. The National Committee on Segregation in the Nation’s Capital published...
Segregation in Washington, detailing the profound social and economic impacts of racist housing policies in DC.
June 1958. DC residents organized Neighbors, Inc. to combat racial steering and white flight.
April 11, 1968. President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1968. Title VIII, known...
as the Fair Housing Act, prohibited most forms of racial, ethnic, and religious discrimination in the
sale or rental of housing and in mortgage lending.
June 17, 1968. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Jones v. Mayer that racial discrimination in the...
sale or rental of property violated the Civil Rights Act of 1866. Almost all conditions under which
discrimination had remained legal under the Fair Housing Act—for example the right of religious
groups or private clubs to discriminate—were thus removed.
This special exhibit has three components.
The Campaign Against Covenants: A Tour of Bloomingdale’s Racial Divide is a guide to key sites in the history of black homeseekers’ efforts to purchase housing restricted to whites. Discover why Bloomingdale’s premier architectural corridor was also a racial barrier, and how civil rights attorneys chipped away at this dividing line in the 1920s–40's. The tour is available in the DC Historic Sites mobile app, which can be downloaded for iOS and Android.
Legal Challenges to Racially Restrictive Covenants maps more than 40 properties that were the subject of lawsuits over the right to freely buy, rent, or convey property. Learn why DC's Bloomingdale neighborhood was central to the NAACP’s national campaign to abolish racial covenants.
Race and Real Estate in Mid-Century DC: The Neighbors, Inc. Records offers a selection of documents that pointedly illustrate how real estate practices combined with other discriminatory policies to facilitate DC’s racial transformation in the 1950s and ‘60s. Most of these come from the DC Public Library.
About the Project
Mapping Segregation in Washington DC reveals the profound role of race in shaping the nation's capital during the first half of the 20th century.
Racially restrictive covenants—which barred the conveyance of property to African Americans—were used by real estate developers and white citizens associations to create and maintain racial barriers. Upheld by the courts, covenants assigned value to housing and to entire neighborhoods based on the race of their occupants, and made residential segregation the norm. Federal policy and local zoning codes served to institutionalize segregation and the displacement of black residents. Segregated housing projects, schools, and playgrounds helped solidify racial boundaries. Although eventually outlawed, covenants had a lasting imprint on the city. Their legacy was central to shaping DC's mid-century racial transformation; led to decades of disinvestment in areas where African Americans lived; and influenced residential patterns that persist today.
Mapping Segregation is a resource for historians, activists, educators, students, and journalists, and provides essential context for conversations around race and gentrification in DC. The project's maps unveil historical patterns that would otherwise remain invisible and largely unknown. The ongoing, lot-by-lot documentation of racial covenants is set in the context of DC's demographic transformation over the course of several decades. Primary documents, archival
news clippings, photographs, and oral testimony also contribute to the stories these maps tell.
(Note that the absence of a covenant on the maps does not necessarily mean there wasn’t one. If some lots in a square had covenants, chances are that most or all lots had them but the deeds containing them have yet to be found. In addition, a square that shows no covenants at all may be one of the many that remain to be surveyed.)
Conceived by historians Mara Cherkasky and Sarah Jane Shoenfeld, of Prologue DC, and GIS specialist Brian Kraft, this project has received funding from Humanities DC , the DC Preservation League, and the National Park Service. Kevin Ehrman-Solberg and Bliss Cartwright provided GIS and data support. Other supporters include the Historical Society of Washington, D.C., All Souls Housing Corporation, the Military Road School Preservation Trust, George Washington University's Center for Washington Area Studies, and Neighbors, Inc.
This website was produced with assistance from the Historic Preservation Fund, administered by the National Park Service, Department of the Interior. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Department of the Interior.
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