Northern Virginia’s fraught history of racial discrimination is well-documented. Now, three researchers have mapped out just how prevalent “whites-only” housing was in the early 20th century—and how those exclusionary policies shaped the communities we live in today. Their hope is that their work will inspire current residents to investigate and learn from their property’s past.
Covenants preventing non-White people from owning or occupying land were once commonplace in this area. “[The practice] was pretty evenly spread across Arlington,” says Krystyn Moon, a researcher and a professor of history and American studies at the University of Mary Washington (UMW) in Fredericksburg. “More lots than not seem to have [had] them,” she says, citing well-known Arlington neighborhoods such as Bellevue Forest, Douglas Park, Arlington Forest and Addison Heights.
Moon’s research, combined with similar research by Marymount University professor emerita of sociology Janine DeWitt and Marymount alumna Kristin Neun, a retired housing attorney, is now accessible via a website, Documenting Exclusion & Resilience, which launched this month. The site includes an interactive map of local subdivisions with a history of discriminatory housing covenants. Visitors to the site might be surprised to see their own neighborhoods shaded on the map.
Moon was. “I live in what I consider a heterogeneous and diverse Northern Virginia,” she says of the region in general. “For people who live here today, I think it’s helpful to be informed about what it used to be like vs. what it is like now. How did we get here? Because for better for worse, things have happened.”
Legislation, the civil rights movements and Supreme Court decisions have reshaped the demographics of our communities, she says, but exclusionary policies that were outlawed more than half a century ago are still having lingering effects. “It’s important to see racially restrictive covenants as a phenomenon of the past that is illegal today. At the same time, its residue is still with us, along with other discriminatory housing practices (e.g. redlining). Collectively, these policies and practices have impacted generational wealth production.”
Today’s economic disparities are, in may ways, the legacy of century-old policies that prevented Black and brown families from building equity that could be passed down to future generations. Exclusionary covenants that compelled people of color to seek housing elsewhere also shaped the diversity of our neighborhoods for decades.
Arlington is now home to nearly 240,000 people representing a wide range of ethnicities and racial identities, according to 2023 data. The county’s makeup has changed considerably over the course of 100 years. In 1920, 83% of Arlington residents were White. By 2020, that number was 64%, according to an analysis by county manager Mark Schwartz.
And yet, the proportion of Arlington residents who are Black has been steadily shrinking. Although the county’s Black population grew from about 1,900 in 1920 to nearly 18,800 in 2020, Black residents currently account for about 8% of Arlington’s population, compared with 14% 100 years ago.
Black residents currently account for about 8% of Arlington’s population, compared with 14% a century ago.
Moon, DeWitt and Neun were each researching historical homeownership patterns in the area when they decided to join forces to build the Documenting Exclusion & Resilience project. They pored over public land records through the Arlington Circuit Court’s Land Records Division, Fairfax County Circuit Court Historic Records Center and Alexandria Circuit Court Clerk’s Office, studying land parcels that in many cases had multiple covenants and deeds over time.
They were somewhat surprised to find a history discriminatory practices not just in single-family neighborhoods, but in all types of housing, DeWitt says, including apartments, row houses and duplexes.
“I thought we would find them in the northern part of Arlington or in the largest pieces of property, but that’s not the case at all,” she says. “They seem to have been used across the board.”
The orange-shaded areas of the map above represent lots that had at least one racially restrictive covenant between 1900 and 1968 (the year such practices became illegal). Clicking on the map pulls up the subdivision name, the year the covenant was recorded and the specific restrictive language. For instance, a 1939 covenant in the Sleepy Hollow portion of Falls Church dictated that, “No lot nor any part thereof, nor any interest therein shall be sold or leased or donated to any person other than members of the Caucasian race.”
“We’re not tracking all the racially restrictive covenants on a lot,” DeWitt clarifies, adding that the map is a work in progress. “What you’re seeing are snapshots in time, rather than a complete history of all the racial covenants that could have been on a parcel. I think the map will underestimate the number of parcels that had racial covenants. We don’t assume we’ll be able to find them all.”
But the snapshot alone is significant. So far, the map identifies nearly 11,000 lots in Arlington, about 12,000 in Fairfax County and 1,200 in the City of Falls Church that were subject to discriminatory housing practices. Those numbers will grow when the team adds tranches in the coming months.
In addition to tracking where racial covenants were prevalent, the researchers are examining the systemic constructs that allowed such policies to exist, including government policies, segregation laws and the real estate industry practices of the time.
“The national organization that represented Realtors actively promoted use of racial covenants starting in the ’20s,” Neun says.
Other contributing factors included skyrocketing housing needs during the Great Depression, a lack of uniform building codes, Jim Crow laws, anti-immigration sentiments and prejudicial financing, such as loans that would balloon within five years, pricing many homeowners out.
Mortgages were also racially restricted. In 1934, the government established the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) to act as a mortgage loan insurer, which boosted the number of private lenders willing to provide long-term home loans. But the 1938 FHA Underwriting Manual stated that loan approval must guarantee “prevention of the infiltration of…inharmonious racial groups.”
In 1939, FHA approved the development of the Arlington Village apartment complex just off Columbia Pike—one of the first to be constructed on land subject to racial covenants. Similar attached housing developments built with racial restrictions included Buckingham, Westover Apartments and Fillmore Gardens, according to the mapping project.
During World War II, FHA, the Veterans Administration, and the short-lived, federally authorized Defense Homes Corp. approved the use of racial covenants, putting them into play in the 3,439-unit Fairlington townhome complex. Other builders followed suit. The developer of a subdivision known as Flower Gardens (near the site that’s now home to the Pentagon) stated that the community was only for persons of “the Caucasian Race.”
“FHA’s more affordable loan terms attracted an increasing number of civil servants eager to purchase a home in NoVA starting in the mid 1930s. To attract buyers, developers often highlighted both the restricted nature of their communities, as well as the availability of FHA financing,” the researchers write on their website.
The use of racial covenants slowed after the Supreme Court in 1948 ruled that they violated the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause and could not be enforced by the courts.
After that ruling, government entities and developers stopped including discriminatory language in deeds—but prejudicial attitudes remained, even if not in writing. “There still was unspoken pressure,” Neun says. “There was this sort of false notion that it was better if you had a White person [living] in there than you if you had an African American person in there.”
The emergence of civil rights groups, Moon says, is what brought about real change. Locally, an assistant postmaster general protested the fact that 115 Black postal workers were allowed to work in Arlington, but not live there.
Some government agencies began taking action against restrictive covenants that impeded their ability to recruit workers. The Defense Department began sanctioning private property owners who denied residency to Black military families once off-base housing became a necessity.
In 1968, Congress passed the Fair Housing Act, officially making racial covenants illegal.
“The irony is, the federal government, which is in many ways central to the problem of racially restrictive covenants, becomes part of the solution to racially restrictive covenants,” Moon says.
Interested in researching the history of your own property? “Start with your deed and your title policy and work your way back,” she advises. Land records are publicly available, and thousands of racial covenants are still on them.
If you find one, let the research team know so they can add it to the map. “We love the community support,” she says. “If we missed something, please share it.”
And if you discover any racist clauses in legal documents pertaining to your property? You can petition to have them removed. To do so, fill out a covenant release form in accordance with a Virginia law that went into effect July 1, 2020. It allows property owners to “release particular unconstitutional and discriminatory covenants from their property.”