Myers Park, a historic neighborhood in Charlotte, N.C., has wide, tree-lined streets, sweeping lawns and historic mansions worth millions. It’s the kind of neighborhood where people take pride in the pedigree of their homes.
But Myers Park is also struggling with a racial legacy that plagues many communities across the country: discriminatory language written into original home deeds. The restrictions are no longer enforceable, but the words are a painful reminder of history.
The deed on homeowner John Williford’s 75-year-old Myers Park house includes restrictions written by the original developers geared to preserve the parklike feel of the neighborhood. The deeds also include racial restrictions: “This lot shall be owned and occupied by people of the Caucasian race only.”
It’s history. It happened. NPR really needs to quit obsessing about race.
The real measure that we have moved beyond this is that it is abhorent to us. I bought an old house in Baton Rouge 20 years ago. I researched the original deed documents so I could understand what parts of the house were the original parts. And sure enough, in the old neighborhood covenants was a restriction that negros could not live in main houses but could only work there. They could only live in detached houses on the same land. I was shocked to read that and thankful that our country and city had moved beyond that to the point that African-American families lived in the neighborhood. There is a lot in mankind’s history that we wish wasn’t there. Those who don’t study history might be doomed to repeat it and it is good to recognize this is something we never ever want to repeat.
I live on the Illinois side of the St. Louis metropolitan area, about 25 miles from downtown St. Louis. The deed shows that transfers from about 1890 to 1940 prohibited the sale of what is now my house, in perpetuity, to any members of the “Negro” or “Mongoloid” races. Of course, all such covenants became unenforceable, as a matter of federal law, after the US Supreme Court decision in Shelley v. Kramer, in 1948. That case arose out of a property transfer on the North Side of St. Louis.
Like the first writer above, I am a little curious about why these covenants are suddenly newsworthy. I suspect that they are found in the chains of title of most properties in the old Confederacy, and a substantial number of properties in the Northeast and Midwest. But again, since 1948, they have meant nothing. The US Supreme Court said to buyers and sellers of property, in essence, “you can put all those clauses in your papers that you want, but it is a Constitutional violation for any Court to enforce one of them.”
Not to make light of the seriousness of this bit of history, but if you dig up any old house, you’ll find skeletons, and probably cast iron pipes and asbestos.
Anybody who knows anything about American history should not find this particularly shocking or newsworthy.
I’m with you, #1. This is just more “white guilt” mongering. Enough already.