April 18, 2022
Racial Restrictive Covenant Project – Volunteer Opportunity for Students
What is the Racial Restrictive Covenants Project
The language of segregation and exclusion haunts the cities and suburbs of Washington State. Racist restrictions, although now illegal, remain in the deeds and other property records of hundreds of neighborhoods, a toxic residue from the decades when racial segregation was allowed, indeed promoted, by local governments throughout the state. The Racial Restrictive Covenants Project is a public history project dedicated to identifying and mapping racial covenants in Washington state. This project was authorized in May of 2021 by the state legislature under SHB 1335. To date the project has identified documents covering about 20,000 properties in King County and the work will be continuing in every county across the state!
How do I volunteer?
We need your help! We recently launched our Zooniverse page which allows people within our community to get involved in the research! On Zooniverse volunteers will be reading property deeds with suspected restrictions, confirming and transcribing the racial covenants, and answering a few simple questions. The process only takes a couple of minutes and volunteers can look through as few or as many as they like! Volunteers are a crucial part of this research and would not be possible without the help of members of our community. For every 15 documents that a volunteer examines this will count as one volunteer hour served. Time spent attending one of our weekly transcription sessions can also be counted as one volunteer hour. If a student has trouble examining 15 documents in an hour they can reach out to us and we can work with them to come up with something more manageable.
Please email jwoods34@uw.edu or wacovenants@gmail.com if you would like more information. You are also invited to sign up for our newsletter and attend one of our weekly transcription sessions at our website.
For more information, please visit
Racial Restrictive Covenants Project Site
