Mark Brown was flipping through property records in Warwick City Hall when he encountered something unexpected. As part of his volunteer work with the local historic cemetery commission, he was looking to see if a small cemetery had a right-of-way attached to it.
What he found in a deed from 1940 for a neighboring house shocked him:
“No persons of any race other than the Caucasian race shall use or occupy any building or any lot except that this covenant shall not prevent occupancy by domestic servants of a different race domiciled with the owner or tenant.”
“I first read that while I’m standing there in the archives,” Brown said. “I murmured to myself, holy s—!”
What Brown found is known as a racially-restrictive covenant, a relic of a time when property owners and developers could write restrictions into deeds to ensure that individual homes — and sometimes entire subdivisions — would be part of a segregated, all-white community.
“It seems like centuries ago, but 1940 was shortly before I was born,” Brown said.
Though racially-restrictive covenants are now illegal, they remain visible in the chain of property records tied to many local homes, and offer a clear window into a recent past in Rhode Island where some communities openly practiced racial segregation. Historians say their use also influenced another planning tool that is still the dominant force shaping cities and towns today: zoning.
This story is part of our series Zoned Out: How local zoning hurts efforts to solve Rhode Island’s decades-long housing shortage. Click here to see more stories from this series.
The foundations of Rhode Island’s municipal zoning codes were laid in the 1920s, when racial covenants were an accepted, and legal, tool. Cities across the country were grappling with rapid growth and advocates argued that zoning would empower local leaders to create healthier cities, and protect property values, by organizing industry, business, apartments, and single-family homes into different districts. Pre-existing racial covenants sometimes helped determine how cities drew those lines.
LaDale Winling, a professor of history at Virginia Tech, said zoning “was some civic leaders’ answer to the question of ‘How do we keep things apart?’”
“They did it hand in hand with a wide variety of these other public policies and these other private practices, like covenants, to keep activities apart, to keep people apart, and to keep cities segregated,” Winling said.
An interwoven history
Covenants inserted into deeds have long been a way for developers and property owners to control how land can be used. Not always related to race, some covenants restrict the size or type of a building that can be built, designate specific architectural styles, or require particular kinds of fencing. But in the early 20th century, just as municipal zoning became more widespread, the use of racial covenants exploded as cities grew and became more diverse.
As Black people fled the Jim Crow south and immigrants arrived from around the world, some cities, like Baltimore, responded by passing ordinances creating separate districts where Black people and white people could live, segregating the entire city. But in 1917, the U.S. Supreme Court found such policies violated the 14th amendment because they interfered with private property rights.
In response, Winling said, two separate yet interwoven strategies emerged. Explicit racial segregation fell to private contracts like restrictive covenants. Their use further expanded after the Supreme Court affirmed that covenants were constitutional in 1926.
That year, the court also ruled municipal zoning was legal. Cities and towns passed zoning codes regulating what could be built where, creating distinct industrial and commercial zones, and in some cases, banning the construction of multifamily apartment buildings in areas zoned exclusively for single-family homes.
“It wasn’t like in the 1920s, people were just like, ‘Oh, the only reason for this is we like large yards and this is an aesthetics issue’,” said Amy Dain, an independent researcher who published a report on the exclusionary history of zoning in Boston. “They understood that it would have an effect of excluding people.”
At the time, advocates argued that new zoning laws would work alongside racially-restrictive covenants — in some cases turning neighborhoods where developers had already imposed racial covenants into single-family zones. The federal government also relied on racial covenants to underpin policies like redlining, where Black people, and sometimes immigrants, were excluded from accessing federally-insured mortgages, and in turn, homeownership.
“A lot of the leaders who were thinking about using covenants on properties thought that zoning may be a more effective and lasting mechanism for exclusion,” Dain said.
That proved to be prescient. In 1948, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled racial covenants could not be enforced by state or federal courts. But they continued to be added to deeds anyway, as a racist signal to prospective homebuyers if nothing else. It wasn’t until Congress passed the Fair Housing Act in 1968 that the inclusion of racially-restrictive covenants was banned altogether.
The origins of zoning in Rhode Island
Providence passed its first zoning ordinance in 1923. In a report published that year explaining why zoning would benefit the city, planning consultant Robert Whitten described how the new zoning code would reinforce a “natural trend toward segregation.”
“The need of all residential sections for protection and for the preservation of their uniformity and integrity is urgent to check and repel the advance of antagonistic invasions,” the report said.
Whitten also assured developers and property owners in his report that zoning would not interfere with “private restrictions,” like racially restrictive covenants.
The “three decker and apartment house menace,” as Whitten put it, would be separated into their own districts of the city. Records show that about a decade after the city implemented zoning, those areas were poorer and more diverse, and in parts of the city that directly abutted industrial zones. The wealthiest, whitest neighborhoods in Providence were generally zoned for single-family homes and duplexes.
While zoning codes in Providence and other municipalities have changed since they were introduced a century ago, the legacy of those original maps lives on.
In many communities zoning has grown more restrictive, making it harder to build the kinds of affordable housing that make neighborhoods more diverse. Last year, HousingWorks RI, a housing policy think tank, created an interactive zoning atlas for the state, mapping all the local rules controlling what can be built where.
According to the atlas, local regulations prohibit construction of anything besides a single-family home on 87% of the developable land in the state.
“Zoning is an important tool, but it also can be an exclusive tool,” said Brenda Clement, the executive director of Housing Works RI. “In many cases, tools like this, and like covenants, were used to exclude.”
Beyond their influence on early zoning codes, historians say racial covenants also prevented people of color, particularly Black people, from accruing wealth by purchasing property and building equity, contributing to the racial wealth gap. In 2022, a study found just 32% of Black Rhode Islanders own homes, compared to 64% of white Rhode Islanders, lagging behind the national average.
“Our current racial residential segregation reflects those patterns that were enduring from histories of redlining and racially restrictive covenants,” said the study’s lead researcher, Akilah Dulin, a professor at Tulane University.
Connecting past and present
In the early 1980s, George Caruolo read an article about racial covenants in property deeds. Caruolo, an attorney and the former Democratic majority leader of the Rhode Island House of Representatives, decided to look up the original deed of the Riverside home he’d recently purchased.
“I grew up here and it never struck me as the type of place that would be worried about that kind of thing,” Caruolo said. “But lo and behold, just by chance, just to make sure, I checked my deed and there it was.”
The grantees by acceptance of this deed hereby agree that they will not build more than 1 one-family dwelling house on said lot … and that they will not sell said premises to any person of the negro race.
His house was part of a subdivision created in 1939. Many of the original lots carried the same racial restriction. When subdividing land into new suburban communities, developers would often include racial restrictions on an entire community as a way to prevent integration.
“Being an attorney who was involved in property law, it’s not something that I’ve never heard of before,” Caruolo said. “I was surprised to find it in Riverside.”
Exactly how often racially-restrictive covenants were used in Rhode Island, or where their use was most common, is not fully understood yet. Elaine Stiles, a historian and professor at Roger Williams University and two of her colleagues, Nicole Dyszlewski and Haley Lott, want to change that.
“It’s about seeing the legacy of those invisible things,” Stiles said. “They’re buried in each town’s history of deeds. You come across them by chance and it’s like a little bolt of lightning every time you do.”
On a hot July day, Dyszlewski, who teaches about race and the law, pulled a heavy book the size of a butcher’s block off a shelf at the East Providence Recorder of Deeds, the public building where all the city’s property transactions are recorded on paper. Flipping open to page 518, she ran her finger down the yellowing paper. Last in a list of covenants on the property, she found it:
This conveyance is made subject to the restriction that the premises herein described shall never be used or occupied nor conveyed to any person of the negro race.
“This didn’t just happen, but people did this, and how do we untie the knot?” Dyszlewski said. “Well, we’ve got to first figure out who tied the knot to begin with.”
Dyszlewski and her colleagues plan to comb through land records across Rhode Island.
They’re still figuring out their approach. Some cities have digitized records, but others don’t. The team may find themselves flipping through thousands and thousands of pages in old, dusty books, one by one. Ultimately, they hope to create a map showing where racial covenants existed and how they correlate with contemporary inequities.
“It is very much not something that used to happen and doesn’t matter now,” Dyszlewski said. “It’s very much something that continues to be relevant.”
The Rhode Island Historical Preservation & Heritage Commission provided data used to help research this story.
