Long before the civil rights legislation of the 1960s, there was a quieter, more bureaucratic form of housing discrimination: clauses written directly into property deeds that prohibited certain households from ever owning or renting those properties. These racially restrictive covenants (RRCs) locked generations of Black families out of the housing market and helped shape the Greenville we live in today. View the interactive StoryMap.
Hidden in Plain Sight
RRCs were clauses written into property deeds barring them from being sold, rented, or occupied by Black households—and in many cases, by Asian Americans and Jewish families as well. Entire subdivisions were closed to Black residents; the earliest covenant we found in Greenville County dates to 1905. The Supreme Court ruled RRCs unenforceable in 1948—and their prevalence was underscored by the fact that three of the nine justices had to recuse themselves because they likely owned racially restricted property. But the covenants didn’t stop. Private parties continued writing them into deeds for decades, and the Furman research team found covenants still appearing into the early 1970s, years after the Fair Housing Act of 1968 made them illegal.
Furman’s Seeking Abraham Project, which examines the university’s connections with slavery and its legacies, provided support for the Greenville RRC project. Student researchers at the Shi Institute spent the summer of 2021 searching all 900 of Greenville County’s deed books—roughly 400,000 individual deeds—and found racially restrictive language more than 12,000 times. The project was covered by SC Public Radio and the Post and Courier, and an interactive map is available online for residents to search for covenants near their own homes.
Generational Wealth Denied
It is tempting to think of racially restrictive covenants as relics of a distant era. But the covenants did more than segregate neighborhoods. They prevented generations of Black families from owning homes in appreciating markets, from building equity, from passing wealth on to children and grandchildren. Homeownership is the primary vehicle for wealth-building in America, and Black households in Greenville were legally excluded from it for most of the 20th century.
That history shows in Greenville today. Research by the Shi Institute and Dr. Ken Kolb, chair of Furman’s sociology department documents a persistent gap between Black and white household incomes in Greenville’s historically Black neighborhoods—a gap that has not closed significantly even as the city has thrived. Understanding where that gap comes from is the first step toward addressing it.
A project of the Shi Institute for Sustainable Communities at Furman University, funded by the Seeking Abraham Project.