Racial Housing Covenants

 by Rachel Dworkin, archivist

In February 1958, Ganung Realty Company listed 917 Lake Street in Elmira for sale. The spacious home had 4 bedrooms, 1 bath, an attic playroom, multiple fireplaces, and an enclosed front porch. It also boasted a 2-car garage and a fenced-in back yard perfect for pets. The list price as $10,800 or approximately $125,000 in today’s dollars. There was one catch: no coloreds.

917 Lake Street

 

917 Lake Street realtor's notes.

Real covenants, or legal agreements related to land use, have a long history in American law. These agreements can be between the current owner and buyer, between the current owner and all future buyers, and between neighbors as in a home owners’ association. Covenants can lay out an action which must be performed or forbid an action. In the case of covenants between owners and buyers, the terms of the agreement are written right into the deed of sale. Up until fairly recently, it was legal to restrict the race of who could buy or rent a property.

In America, the first racially restrictive housing covenants emerged in the mid-19^th century. They didn’t become widespread, however, until 1917 when the Supreme Court struck down race-based municipal zoning laws in the case Buchanan v. Warley. White landowners turned to racial covenants to keep racial minorities out of their neighborhoods. The specific language used varied wildly. Some simply specified that owners must be white or American-born. Others named specific groups blocked from buying, most often Blacks, but frequently including Asians, Jews, and immigrants.

Locally, there is little evidence of racial zoning laws. There were, however, multiple housing developments with racial restrictions. From 1914 through 1916, the Glen View Manor development, located in West Elmira between Water and Church Streets across from Rorick’s Glen, was billed as “fully restricted” and “carefully restricted” with “not a lot sold to an undesirable party.” The Fairfax development, located on the Southside off Broadway, was more explicit with regard to racial segregation. A 1929 ad proudly proclaimed the development was restricted to white people only. Just a year later, the Blemont tract, between Lake and Grand Central Avenue on the northside, was similarly restricted. Most of West Elmira’s post-war construction was advertised as being a “restricted neighborhood.”

Ad for Fairfax development, June 28, 1929

 Civil rights activists did not take this lying down. The NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) and various buyers of color brought a series of lawsuits related to racial covenants. In 1926, the Supreme Court upheld them as legal in Corrigan v. Buckley as they were private and not government action. In 1948, however, the court reversed course in Shelley v. Kraemer, finding that, while having a housing covenant in and of itself didn’t violate the Fourteenth Amendment, using a court to enforce it did. Despite this, homeowners continued to use racial covenants until 1968 when Title VIII of the Civil Rights Act, better known as the Fair Housing Act, explicitly prohibited racial covenants and discrimination against renters and buyers based on race, color, religion, or nation of origin. The law was later expanded to include sex, family status, disability, and LGBTQ status.

Despite no longer being legal, the effects of racial housing covenants still linger today. The racist language is still written into historic deeds and appears on abstracts of title. Moreover, the economic impact still persists. Multiple generations of Black families were unable to build generational wealth through homeownership. Generally speaking, homeownership accounts for as much as two-thirds of individual household wealth. White families are four times more likely to inherit a house or received funds from the sale of one as Black families. Economists estimate that between 12 and 16% of the nation’s persistent racial wealth gap stems from this disparity. The house on Lake Street was far from an isolated incident and racial covenants restricted far more than where people could live.

 

How Racism Kills

By Rachel Dworkin, archivist

 

Shortly after the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police, a young researcher asked me if anyone in Elmira had ever died because they were Black. The only answer I could give her was, well, it’s complicated. It’s complicated for a couple of reasons. Firstly, no one has ever died because they’re Black. They’ve died because the people and systems around them were racist. Secondly, it’s complicated because racism in Elmira has never taken the form of lynch mobs yelling racial slurs. No, our local brand of racism is far more subtle, but no less dangerous.

Take, for example, the case of Bessie Berry. In 1981, she became the first Black woman to work as a Corrections Councilor at the Elmira Correctional Facility. Despite being fully qualified for the position with bachelors and masters degrees, over 10 years’ experience as a probation worker, and high test scores on the civil service exam, she was given the run around throughout the hiring process. In 1986, she was placed in charge of a state-mandated program designed to provide work and retraining opportunities to inmates. For the next year, she struggled to implement the program with no support and lots of pushback from her coworkers and superiors. They finally agreed to sign off on her plans after a class-action lawsuit alleging racial discrimination in work placement was filed by a group of inmates. By then, Berry was so stressed out from all of this that she had a heart attack and was forced to retire. You can hear all about it in her own words in an oral history interview she gave in 1989.

Studies have shown that dealing with everyday racism can have profoundly negative effects on the health of African Americans, leaving them more prone to stress-related ailments such as high blood pressure, heart disease, diabetes, and other such issues. Research also shows that racism can actually cause premature aging, as well as psychological illnesses like depression, anxiety, and even post-traumatic stress disorder. What’s more, Blacks often have a harder time receiving proper health care. Not only are Blacks 1.5 times more likely than whites to be uninsured, they are less likely to receive quality medical care when they do go to a doctor. As late as 2012, a study revealed that 40% of American medical students believed the myth that Black people have thicker skins than whites. Black patients are 22% less likely than whites to receive pain medication after surgery and are 5 times more likely to die in childbirth. The health effects of everyday racism are deadly.

Dr.George Murphy and nurse with patient, 1936

Encounters with police can be dangerous too. In September 2000, a boyfriend-girlfriend fight at a teen dance devolved into a melee between police and about 200 teens. The police broke up the fight using pepper spray, physical force and attack dogs. Following the incident, eight families filed complaints against the department with the Chemung County Commission on Human Relations alleging excessive use of force, especially as directed towards Black members of the crowd. The police launched their own, internal investigation and the FBI was also called in to review for civil rights violations. While the Elmira Police Department concluded that their officers did nothing wrong, the Commission on Human Relations eventually concluded that the police “overreacted” and used excessive force which escalated the incident from an argument between four teenagers into a brawl. They made a series of recommendations regarding police training and public outreach.

Studies show that across the nation police disproportionally stop, arrest, and use excessive force against Blacks. A 2000 study found that, while Blacks made just 12.5% of Elmira’s population, they represented 41% of police stops. In the last decade, approximately 1,000 people were killed by police nationwide each year. In 2017, the Elmira Police Department killed two men, both of them white. Nationally, the majority of individuals killed by police are also white, but, when their overall percentage of the population is taken into account, Black men are estimated to be between 2.5 and 3.5 times more likely to be shot by police than whites. Implicit bias, or our unconscious assumptions about race or other characteristics, play a large role in accounting for the disparity. American society teaches us through film, television, and the stories we choose to tell that Black people are inherently more dangerous, often leading police to be more aggressive with Black suspects. The second of the two men killed in 2017 was suffering from mental illness, which Americans also have strong implicit biases against. People with mental illnesses are 16 times more likely to be killed by police than other civilians. One of the main arguments of the movement to defund the police is that unarmed social workers would be less likely to kill people while performing wellness checks.

Image courtesy of The Society Pages

I wish I lived in a world where I didn’t have to explain to a ten-year-old the ways that racism has killed her neighbors. I hope with knowledge and some societal self-reflection, we can stop it from killing more.

Freedom Rider

By Rachel Dworkin, archivist

On May 4, 1961, thirteen members of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) boarded busses in Washington, D.C. with plans to travel south to New Orleans. The mixed-race group consisting of seven African Americans and six whites planned to flagrantly violate local segregation laws in order to challenge the non-enforcement of the Supreme Court decisions Morgan v. Virginia (1946) and Boynton v. Virginia (1960). In both cases, the court had found that segregation in interstate public transportation and associated terminals was unconstitutional. The Riders hoped provoke a reaction that would raise awareness of the on-going problem. And boy, did they ever. 

As the Freedom Riders headed further south, they came under increasing attack. Several were arrested in the Carolinas and Mississippi for violating segregation laws. Their bus was attacked by multiple mobs in Alabama. By the time they reached Birmingham, Alabama, the Kennedy administration was urging them to stop. Instead, members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) set out on another bus, this time from Nashville, on May 17. Over the course of the summer, some 450 people from across the country would join the movement. 

A white mob burned the Freedom Riders' bus outside Anniston, Alabama on May 14, 1961

 

One of those people was Patricia Bryant, a 20-year-old Elmiran and EFA graduate. She’d just finished up her sophomore year studying social work at Central Ohio State College in Dayton, Ohio when she told her father she was going south to test segregation. On June 9^th, she and four fellow CORE members took a train down the Illinois-Central Railroad to Jackson, Mississippi. Bryant was the only African American in her group. All five of them were arrested for breaching the peace after refusing to leave the whites-only waiting room at the station. 

Patricia Bryant

 

Bryant and her friends were given the harshest sentence of any of the Freedom Riders to date at that point: a $200 and 4 months in jail. By that point, the city and county jails were filling up as Riders intentionally got themselves arrested and prisoners were being transferred to Mississippi State Penitentiary where they were subject to abuse. Isaac Bryant was understandably worried about his daughter’s safety and turned to the local NAACP for help and advice. The same day Patricia Bryant was arrested, the NAACP asked the U.S. District Court to intercede on the Freedom Riders’ behalf and protect them from arrest.  The local NAACP could do little to help Bryant, but promised to back her if she attempted to appeal her conviction. They also planned a welcome home party to celebrate her scheduled release in October.

Luckily for her, Patricia Bryant didn’t serve her full sentence. She was released on June 16^th on $500 bond. A large crowd was on hand to greet her at the Chemung County Airport when she flew home after a brief stay with her mother in Long Island. In September, she transferred to Ithaca College where she received her degree in social work. No word on if the local NAACP ever threw her that party.

The Freedom Rider movement continued to build throughout the summer even as the violence against the Riders escalated. By September, leaders from CORE and SNCC began planning a mass demonstration in Washington, but their plans were interrupted by a ruling from the Interstate Commerce Commission. Effective November 1, 1961, all interstate transportation lines and terminals would be forced to desegregate everywhere. Black passengers could sit where they wanted, eat at the station lunch counters, and use what had once been whites-only bathrooms. The alliances formed between Southern and Northern activists became the backbone of the later civil rights movement and many individual Riders went on to participate in subsequent campaigns.  

*****

Patricia Bryant’s story is just one of those profiled in our up-coming on-line exhibit The Color of Change. The exhibit looks at the 100-year history of the local branch of the NAACP. It will go live on February 15^th. Come check it out at: https://cchsonlineexhibits.wixsite.com/naacp