Lasting Impact of Racially Restrictive Covenants (RRCs)

Madison Smith

May 8, 2025

The lasting impact of racially restrictive covenants (RRCs) in the United States has been profound, shaping patterns of racial inequality, residential segregation, and wealth accumulation well into the present. Even though these covenants are no longer legally enforceable, their legacy continues in multiple structural and symbolic ways.

Throughout the 20th-century, RRCs helped create and solidify racially segregated neighborhoods. Even after Shelley v. Kraemer (1948) outlawed judicial enforcement, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968 outlawed racial discrimination in housing, the residential patterns they created persisted, often reinforced by white flight, exclusionary zoning, and ongoing discrimination. These patterns continue to shape school segregation, access to public resources, and community investment.

RRCs created and normalized a racialized housing market where African Americans paid more for less housing and faced barriers to homeownership and upward mobility. This restricted access to wealth-building opportunities, since homeownership has historically been the most common form of asset accumulation in the U.S. (1) Because minority families were locked out of white neighborhoods, intergenerational wealth gaps between white and Black households widened. But it did not stop at just the housing market. RRCs were supported by real estate agents, developers, and the federal government, embedding racist logic into housing finance and planning.

Scholar Carol M. Rose considers the actions outlined and enabled by racial covenants to be classified as ‘dignity takings’, a targeted offense by a powerful entity “with the object of humiliating and terrorizing” a minority group. (2) Rose draws a connection between the destruction of Jewish property by the Nazi party in Kristallnacht and the criteria needed to fulfill the definition of “dignity taking.” This concept builds upon Bernadette Atuahene’s framework of ‘dignity taking’ and ‘dignity restoration’, developed using South Africa’s post-apartheid Land Restitution Commission as her central example of involuntary property loss and intentional return. (3)

Although now outlawed and unenforceable, the racist language still exists in property deeds and HOA covenants, shocking many modern homeowners. Even though some states now have a system in place to allow streamlined processes to strike the covenants from the record, their presence remains a symbolic reminder of legal racism. One lawyer has even detailed her painstakingly long effort to erase the restriction that affected 1,700 homes in a singular homeowners association in Kansas City. (4) The unfortunate reality remains that after courts could no longer enforce RRCs, they still remained in property deeds and influenced social norms and real estate practices for decades. In Montgomery County, developers continued inserting them into deeds after 1948, possibly anticipating judicial reversal or relying on them as signals of racial exclusivity.

Nonetheless, racially restrictive covenants functioned as a powerful legal and cultural instrument of racial segregation, deeply shaping the racial geography of American cities. In a study done in Minnesota, West et al. discovered that neighborhoods with RRCs had higher life expectancy and lower rates of asthma, obesity, diabetes, and heart disease than non-covenanted neighborhoods. Upward mobility was lower for children from poor households in covenanted areas, especially Black children, even though the neighborhoods themselves had socioeconomic resources. In Minnesota and beyond, racially restrictive covenants operated within a legal gray zone that allowed private actors, backed by state courts, to systematically exclude minorities from homeownership, investment and community belonging. (5)

(1) Rose, Carol M. “Racially Restrictive Covenants-Were They Dignity Takings?” Law & Social Inquiry 41, no. 4 (2016): 950-51. doi:10.1111/lsi.12192.

(2) Rose, 953.

(3) Atuahene, Bernadette. “Dignity Takings and Dignity Restoration: Creating a New Theoretical Framework for Understanding Involuntary Property Loss and the Remedies Required.” Law & Social Inquiry 41, no. 4 (2016): 797. http://www.jstor.org/stable/26630887.

(4) Thompson, Cheryl W., Cristina Kim, Natalie Moore, Roxana Popescu, and Corinne Ruff. “Racial Covenants, a Relic of the Past, Are Still on the Books across the Country.” NPR, November 17, 2021. https://www.npr.org/2021/11/17/1049052531/racial-covenants-housing-discrimination. 

(5) West, Kristine, Elizabeth M Allen, Rachel Neiwert, Ava LaPlante, Anchee Nitschke Durben, and Victoria Delgado-Palma. “Lasting Legacy: The Enduring Relationship Between Racially Restrictive Housing Covenants and Health and Wellbeing.” Journal of Urban Health 101, no. 5 (2024): 1026–36. doi:10.1007/s11524-024-00901-8.