Homeowners may be able to reject racially restrictive covenants in titles

“No persons of any race other than the Aryan race shall use or occupy any building or any lot.”

That language appeared in the property titles used by a Minneapolis developer in 1946 to ensure that only whites could move into the homes being built.

The House Judiciary Finance and Civil Law Division gave its support Tuesday to a bill that would provide homeowners a means to reject such language.

HF51, approved on a voice vote and sent to the House Floor, would allow homeowners who find racially restrictive covenants on their titles an opportunity to place an affidavit on that title rejecting the underlying covenant, said the bill’s sponsor, Rep. Jim Davnie (DFL-Mpls). It has no Senate companion.

Although it has been illegal to include racially restrictive covenants in property titles since the passage of the federal Fair Housing Act in 1968, the enforced segregation and the resulting economic inequalities remain today, said Kevin Ehrman-Solberg, digital and geospatial director at the University of Minnesota’s Mapping Prejudice Project.

Ehrman-Solberg said these covenants, which became prevalent statewide beginning in the early 20th century, had a particularly strong impact in the Twin Cities.

In 1910, there were emerging African-American neighborhoods in Minneapolis near Lake Harriet, Lake Nokomis, the Mississippi River, and in Northeast Minneapolis, he said. By the 1950s, African-American families in these emerging neighborhoods were mostly gone, and they had mostly moved to North Minneapolis, he said.

“Racial covenants were a legal way to push people out of existing communities in the city and to concentrate them in small, racially concentrated sections,” he said.

Davnie noted that an affidavit added to the title by a homeowner under his bill would not alter the text of the title, because it’s important for future historians and social researchers to understand and continue to study these covenants.

“This bill allows homeowners to respond to the moral injuries that these racially restrictive covenants represent,” said Davnie.