Wake County’s past is now lit up in red. A new interactive map pinpoints more than 14,500 racially restrictive covenants recorded between 1900 and 1950, turning hundreds of thousands of inked deed pages into searchable red dots scattered across Raleigh and the rest of the county. The volunteer-driven project mapped every identified covenant so anyone can plug in an address and see whether discriminatory language is tied to that parcel. A time-lapse released with the project shows those restrictions spreading from a few early pockets into wide streetcar-era suburbs over the first half of the 20th century.
As reported by The News & Observer, the Wake County Racially Restrictive Covenants Project catalogued more than 14,500 covenants and published a searchable map, a time-lapse video and downloadable geospatial files. Volunteers leaned on artificial intelligence and optical character recognition to scan roughly 600,000 archived pages and flag possible clauses. Register of Deeds Tammy Brunner described the effort as “community-driven” and said the records help tell a fuller story about Wake County’s history.
How Volunteers Turned Deeds Into Data
According to the Wake County Register of Deeds’ volunteer handbook, hundreds of local volunteers were trained to locate, transcribe and index covenants from deed books and other recorded instruments (Wake County). The effort was spearheaded by volunteers Lisa Boccetti and Robert Williams and involved nearly 200 community volunteers, per reporting from GovTech. Human review was paired with automated text searches to scale up quickly and standardize what volunteers found, and the final dataset and county map are now publicly available online (ArcGIS).
What the Dots Reveal
One of the earliest deeds the project uncovered dates to 1906 and, as shown in the archived image, includes explicit language barring Black people from occupying the property along with a separate prohibition on “pigs and hogs.” As noted by The News & Observer, the mapped covenants cluster in neighborhoods that later became higher-income streetcar suburbs. Preliminary analysis by the Register of Deeds suggests those historic restrictions often line up with present-day areas facing lower incomes and reduced access to services, underscoring how exclusion written into deeds helped set up long-running inequality.
Law, Options and Precedents
Racially restrictive covenants were declared unenforceable by the U.S. Supreme Court in Shelley v. Kraemer (1948), and federal law later outlawed race-based housing discrimination under the Fair Housing Act of 1968. For legal background, the Court’s opinion summary and federal fair housing guidance are available (Shelley v. Kraemer via Oyez and the Justice Department’s overview of the Fair Housing Act). Researchers have used similar covenant inventories to shape policy: the University of Washington’s covenant project helped inform Washington state’s Covenant Homeownership Account Act, which directs mortgage assistance to families harmed by historic covenants (University of Washington).
How to Look Up Your Property
To find out whether a parcel carries a recorded covenant, users can enter an address into the project’s interactive StoryMap and then check nearby parcels on the map. The tool also lets users download raw geospatial files for anyone who wants to dig deeper into the data. Visit the Wake County Racially Restrictive Covenants map on ArcGIS to search by address or download the dataset (ArcGIS).
Voices From the Project
Project leaders say the aim is to confront history, not to scrub it out, and to hand the community a clear record of past exclusion. As Lisa Boccetti told ABC11, “The language was ugly. The intent was ugly. The result is ugly,” and volunteers hope the map will push local conversations about repair, acknowledgment and preservation (ABC11).
