Hacking into History

Discovering Racial Covenants in Durham Property Deeds

Hacking into History is a collaborative, community-driven project organized by DataWorks NC, Research Action Design, the School of Library and Information Sciences at North Carolina Central University (NCCU), and the Durham County Register of Deeds. Our project's goal is to tell the story and impact of racially restrictive agreements contained in property deeds in Durham, North Carolina using public records information and archival documentation.

The history of redlining and its impact on American cities is increasingly well-known. Yet the similarly widespread practice of encoding (converting language into action through a systematic process), racially restrictive covenant clauses on property deeds has not received as much attention. By using racial covenants, city developers were able to create specific areas in which only certain ethnic groups could own or rent housing.

Our project is similar to collaborative efforts already under way in cities across the country. Those projects link libraries, civic data organizations, and community members to create online collections of crowd-sourced transcriptions of original property deeds containing racially restrictive covenants.

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