2018 marks the anniversaries of several milestones in the history of fair housing.

June 1958. DC residents organized Neighbors, Inc. to combat racial steering and white flight.

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.

Mapping Segregation in Washington DC reveals the profound impact of racially restricted housing on the nation’s capital. During the first half of the 20th century, restrictive deed covenants—which barred the conveyance of property to African Americans and sometimes other groups—largely controlled where DC residents lived. Real estate developers and white citizens groups used covenants 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. 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.

The project's maps unveil historical patterns that would otherwise remain invisible and largely unknown. The ongoing, lot-by-lot documentation of racial deed 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.

Mapping Segregation is a resource for historians, activists, educators, students, and journalists, and provides essential context for conversations around race and gentrification in DC. Conceived by historians Mara Cherkasky and Sarah Jane
Shoenfeld, of Prologue DC, and GIS specialist Brian Kraft, the project has received funding from Humanities DC, the DC Preservation League, and the African American Civil Rights Grant Program of 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.