Louis Public Radio also discovered that a portion of the Southwest Garden neighborhood just west of the Missouri Botanical Garden has a racially restrictive covenant on it.
“So how do we fix it?”įlowers is working with Jackson to amend the paperwork tied to his home, so that his chain of title reflects the painful history but releases the restriction. That was never right,” he said, wiping away tears. Louis, Flowers, who is white, knew this sort of systemic discrimination existed, but he got choked up reading the document as he thought of his biracial relatives. The document states that lots in the subdivision cannot be, “conveyed leased to rented to or in any way occupied, or owned by negros. It was put in place by the developer who plotted out a subdivision that includes the red brick home Flowers shares with his partner in the Princeton Heights neighborhood of southwest St. On a recent afternoon, Jason Flowers, a 42-year-old realtor, adjusted the lever on the microfilm reader inside the city’s land records department to scroll through a handwritten covenant dating back to 1910. Louis Equal Housing Opportunity Council, where she works as a staff attorney. Kalila Jackson stands outside the offices of the Metropolitan St. “It was a sign of the times back then, it was the norm.” Flowers, a realtor, is now attempting to amend it. “I was shocked it was still there, but it wasn’t a surprise,” Phillips said. Louis has a racially restrictive covenant attached to it. “If we're interested in redressing that, whether it's through some sort of local reparations policy, or whether it's just through adopting planning policies that undo some of that damage, I think it's important to understand where it came from.”īrian Munoz Steve Phillips and his partner Jason Flowers (right) recently learned their home in the Princeton Heights neighborhood of south St. “We still live in deeply segregated cities,” he said. Louis and analyze their long-lasting impacts on neighborhoods. After weeks of tediously sifting through records, Gordon was able to create the first comprehensive map of covenants in St. Jackson and other local groups have been working with Colin Gordon, a history professor at the University of Iowa, over the last couple of years to unearth racially restrictive covenants in the region. You don’t have to worry about that.’ But I think we know that's only half the story.” “If you called a random attorney, many of them probably would say, 'Oh, well, this is unenforceable. "There's not a lot of people who are familiar with the process,” she said. But a few attorneys, including Jackson, are helping homeowners do it for free. Property records can’t be erased, and there’s no specific statute allowing individual homeowners to easily amend restrictive covenants themselves. That’s changing as more research becomes available, prompting homeowners to inspect their chain of title for the racist documents and look for ways to rectify them. The covenants have been unenforceable and illegal for decades, yet many homeowners have no idea these documents linger in their property records. Louis Public Radio reported Thursday that there are roughly 30,000 properties in the city with restrictive covenants tied to their deeds that specifically bar selling or renting to Black people, among other racial, ethnic and religious groups. Louis in the early- to mid-1900s to keep Black families out of white neighborhoods. The legal documents were widely used in St. “To see ‘no Negros,’ or ‘no Jewish people allowed,’ that does a certain violence to one’s spirit,” said Jackson, who is Black.
Louis Equal Housing and Opportunity Council wants to make sure homeowners don’t get the same shock she did reading a covenant for the first time. The senior attorney at the Metropolitan St. Kalila Jackson has a big goal written on her vision board: End racially restrictive covenants.