Mapping Racial Covenants in Washtenaw County
Initial results of our crowdsourcing effort to document the nearly 10,000 Washtenaw County property records that may contain racial covenants.
The above map indicates the presence or absence of racial covenants on at least one property in the subdivision in the Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti area. Subdivisions are groups of properties within neighborhoods that are developed at the same time.
In 2021, our team worked with Liberty Title to create an initial dataset of around 120 subdivisions that have at least one racial covenant in Washtenaw County (indicated in blue). As of August 2024, more than 300 volunteers have contributed more than 1,200 hours of their time to find almost 100 additional subdivisions that have at least one racial covenant (indicated in orange). This map is also available in an interactive web version, which includes subdivisions outside of the Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti areas.
What’s Next
We need your help in helping fill out this map further! Join one of our transcription events or visit our Transcribe page to get started analyzing documents yourself. We have almost 10,000 documents to go through and we’re only 25% of the way to completing them.
This map does not represent the full extent of racial covenants in Washtenaw county. Since the above map only indicates covenants in subdivisions, it will not display covenants for properties that were part of transactions either before a subdivision was founded or never became part of a subdivision. Future versions of the map will display covenanted properties throughout subdivisions and properties not within a subdivision.
Our goal is to use the information created by our volunteers to make a searchable map where members of our communities can see if a given property had a racial covenant as part of its history, not just at the subdivision level, but at the level of individual properties. This will also inform efforts to repair the harms done by these racial covenants.
If you have questions or comments on the map or our process, please contact us at justiceindeedmi [at] umich.edu.