Martinez, California – The Contra Costa County Clerk-Recorder’s office is excited to announce the launch of Mapping Prejudice in Contra Costa County. This powerful community-driven initiative will identify and map racially restrictive covenants, clauses that were inserted into local property records to keep people who were not white from owning or occupying property.
Contra Costa County is doing this work in partnership with the Mapping Prejudice Project, a research team based in the University of Minnesota Libraries. This group has been working with communities across the country to map racial covenants since 2016. This new initiative—Mapping Prejudice in Contra Costa County– will engage residents of Contra Costa County to identify and transcribe the information necessary to put these now-illegal restrictions on a modern map. The project is a direct response to California Assembly Bill (AB) 1466 chaptered in 2021, which mandates that county recorders develop a plan to identify and redact racially discriminatory covenants from all property records across the state. Mapping Prejudice in Contra Costa County takes a community-centered, educational approach to fulfilling this requirement. To date, 9 million records have been initially reviewed, and thousands have been flagged for potentially restrictive language.
Racial covenants were once commonly inserted into property deeds to exclude minority groups from owning or occupying certain properties or living in certain communities. Although outlawed by the Fair Housing Act of 1968, these covenants remain embedded in property records, silently shaping patterns of inequality and segregation today.
“Mapping Prejudice in Contra Costa County is about more than finding discriminatory language in old documents—it’s about community education and engagement. By confronting this hidden history, we can better understand its lasting impact on our neighborhoods. I have heard from residents who are bothered by this language in the official records for their homes and want it removed. There is a real learning opportunity for all our communities about this historical existence of these illegal covenants here in Contra Costa,” said Kristin B. Connelly, Clerk-Recorder and Registrar of Voters.
Community volunteers from all corners of Contra Costa County are invited to take part in this important work. “Our University of Minnesota team is thrilled to work with Contra Costa County,” said Dr. Kirsten Delegard, project director of Mapping Prejudice at the University of Minnesota Libraries. “Contra Costa County shares our commitment to inviting community members into the process of historical recovery. That’s how we connect the past to the present and open the door for reparative work.”
Volunteers will receive training and access to a digital portal to examine historical property records that have been flagged by the research team at the University of Minnesota for review. These documents offer a powerful hands-on learning experience and create an opportunity for community dialogue about our history and the legacy of housing discrimination.
For more information on Mapping Prejudice in Contra Costa County and to volunteer, please visit our website at www.contracostavote.gov, or email us at [email protected].
For more background on the Mapping Prejudice Project at the University of Minnesota visit mappingprejudice.umn.edu or email [email protected].
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Editors Note: According to the University of Minnesota:
What are racial covenants?
Racial covenants can be found in the property records of every American community. These restrictive clauses were inserted into property deeds to prevent people who were not White from buying or occupying land.
Racial covenants served as legally-enforceable contracts. They stipulated that the property had to remain in the hands of White people and they ran with the land, which meant that it could be enforced in perpetuity. Anyone who dared to challenge this ban risked forfeiting their claim to the property.
A survey of the 30,000 covenants unearthed in Hennepin and Ramsey Counties illuminates the wide variety of people targeted. An early Minneapolis restriction proclaimed that the “premises shall not at any time be conveyed, mortgaged or leased to any person or persons of Chinese, Japanese, Moorish, Turkish, Negro, Mongolian or African blood or descent.” Before 1919, Jews were often included in this laundry list of “objectionable” people.
This language shifted with time. This eugenics-inspired list gave way to simpler declarations that the property could only be “be occupied exclusively by person or persons. . .of the Caucasian Race.” While many different kinds of people were targeted by racial covenants, every restriction identified by Mapping Prejudice bars Black people, as they were perceived by White Minnesotans to be particularly likely to decrease property values.
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