Racial Covenants in Hennepin County
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Racial Covenants in Hennepin County
Published Date
2020-11-25
Author Contact
Corey, Michael
mapprejudice@umn.edu
mapprejudice@umn.edu
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Spatial Data
Spatial Data
Abstract
This data was compiled by the Mapping Prejudice Project and shows the location of racial covenants recorded in Hennepin County between 1910 and 1955. Racial covenants were legal clauses embedded in property records that restricted ownership and occupancy of land parcels based on race. These covenants dramatically reshaped the demographic landscape of Hennepin County in the first half of the twentieth century. In 1948, the United States Supreme Court ruled racial covenants to be legally unenforceable in the Shelly v. Kraemer decision. Racial covenants continued to be inserted into property records, however, prompting the Minnesota state legislature to outlaw the recording of new racial covenants in 1953. The same legislative body made covenants illegal in 1962. The practice was formally ended nationally with the passage of the Fair Housing Act in 1968.
Description
The data for this project was sourced from historical property records (primarily warranty deeds) in Hennepin County using optical character recognition (OCR) and crowdsourcing. OCR was used to process the entirety of the historical property record for Hennepin County between 1900 and 1960 and identified the subset of records that contained at least one instance of a predefined list of key words and word stems that indicated the presence of a racial covenant. Because the project used OCR to identify likely covenants, there are cases where covenanted deeds were missed due to the presence of handwritten documents or when the deed scan or original document was of poor quality.
Deeds containing at least one of the key words were uploaded to Zooniverse, where volunteers read the flagged deeds and transcribed the relevant attribute information. Each deed had to be transcribed by five unique volunteers and the results were checked using a variation of Cohen’s kappa statistic to assign volunteer reliability scores. The data from volunteers whose score fell below a certain threshold was then dropped from the database. For each unique deed, we then calculated the modal value for each field based on the volunteer data that remained. When a field had no agreement, the value provided by the user with the highest Cohen’s kappa score for that deed was kept.
The results were joined with existing parcel boundaries where possible. In cases where the covenanted parcel had no contemporary match, the original plat map for that parcel was used to create the spatial boundaries. Covenants that only covered partial lots were also drawn in manually.
Referenced by
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10708-020-10294-1
https://ssrn.com/abstract=3468520
https://ssrn.com/abstract=3468520
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Center for Urban and Regional Affairs
University Metropolitan Consortium
City of Minneapolis ‒ Office of Community Planning and Economic Development
Minneapolis Area Association of Realtors
Borchert Map Library Endowment
The CREATE Initiative
Fourth Generation at the Minneapolis Foundation
Irwin Andrew Porter Foundation
University Metropolitan Consortium
City of Minneapolis ‒ Office of Community Planning and Economic Development
Minneapolis Area Association of Realtors
Borchert Map Library Endowment
The CREATE Initiative
Fourth Generation at the Minneapolis Foundation
Irwin Andrew Porter Foundation
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Ehrman-Solberg, Kevin; Petersen, Penny; Mills, Marguerite; Delegard, Kirsten; Mattke, Ryan. (2020). Racial Covenants in Hennepin County. Retrieved from the Data Repository for the University of Minnesota (DRUM), https://doi.org/10.13020/a88t-yb14.
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Hennepin_County_Racial_Covenants.zip
Shapefile denoting the location of racial covenants in Hennepin County and associated attribute data
(4.55 MB)
Hennepin_County_Racial_Covenants_Table.csv
CSV containing the attribute data found in the Hennepin_County_Racial_Covenants shapefile
(9.93 MB)
Hennepin_County_Racial_Covenants_Codebook_20231009.txt
Text file containing variable descriptions and additional methodological information (Updated Oct 9, 2023)
(6.89 KB)
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