The modest Cape-style homes on a side street in Beverly are the kind of starter homes with manicured lawns that could accommodate young families looking to settle down in a seaside community rich with New England history. But deep in their foundation, there remains a chilling vestige of America’s racist past that, if not legal today, still lives on in government property records.
They are deed restrictions, racial covenants that for decades were used to keep Black and Hispanic households, sometimes Jewish or other ethnicities such as Armenians, from living there. A recent research project found hundreds of examples of them in the Southern Essex Registry of Deeds in Salem. They contain language that, for example, prohibited the properties from being sold or conveyed to, or even occupied by, “no person of other than the Caucasian race.”
Such covenants were discontinued in the 1960s, and the language that remains in deeds today is legally void. Nonetheless, the racist practice has left a lasting imprint, playing a large part in why so much of the state is segregated along racial lines, with economic disparities that still resonate.
Now, housing and civil rights advocates say, the covenants and similar policies that historically discriminated against certain groups of people can be turned on their ear, and used as a tool to close a wealth gap drawn along those same racial lines. Advocates are increasingly citing the existence of these covenants, for instance, as legal and political justification as they push banks to create more specialized loans with better interest rates specifically for people of color to buy their first home, or for start-up grants solely for Black and Latino entrepreneurs looking to open a business.
Racial groups or geographic areas that could show they have suffered from a pattern of racist policies, such as the use of covenants, would qualify under what are known as special purpose credit programs.
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