"The Mississippi of the West": Racist Covenants in Reno, Nevada

There has long been an awareness that structural racism in American economic, employment, housing, and educational systems has been long-lasting and difficult to remedy. But in the arena of racism in housing, scholars and public-facing digital humanities projects have emphasized “redlining,” the use of Federal Housing and Loan Corporation (HOLC) maps to deny Federal mortgage insurance from racially mixed or minority-majority neighborhoods. These maps are visually stunning and impactful, but they mask the fact that racial discrimination was as much or perhaps even more “bottom-up” as it was “top-down,” reifying discrimination by millions of local lenders, sellers, and landlords. In addition, the redlining maps do not cover the entire country, only its largest metropolises. There were none for Nevada. Nor do they show the racially restrictive covenants buried in hundreds of millions of warranty deeds across the country.

The Racist Covenants Research Project aims to research, interpret, and publicize the experiences of people of color in Northern Nevada, beginning with a project to map the use of racially restrictive covenants in property deeds in Reno. Thus far, the project has mapped over 4,500 properties with racist covenants. This project employs deeds recently digitized by the Washoe County Recorder’s Office, as well as ArcGIS mapping software, research in historical archives, and oral history interviews. It focuses on racially restrictive covenants at the subdivision level, since private developers frequently used such measures from the early 1920s to the early 1960s, despite the fact that the Supreme Court ruled them unconstitutional in 1948. Subdivision records also make it possible to uncover racial covenants in swaths of Reno without going through thousands of individual deeds.

Studying racial discrimination in Washoe County’s housing market is of special relevance for several reasons. As a Western city built on tourism, Reno/Sparks is typical of urban development in the nation’s “Sun Belt,” where much of the nation’s development happened after World War II. Racial discrimination once gave Nevada the unfortunate sobriquet “The Mississippi of the West.” While there was severe discrimination against African Americans in Nevada, including the expulsion of “idle” Black men from Reno in 1904, as well as customary segregation in casinos in both Reno and Las Vegas through the 1960s, the main target of Reno’s racist covenants were Asians or “Mongolians,” which reflects the anti-Asian hysteria endemic to the West Coast and the history of expulsions of Asians throughout the region in the late nineteenth century. In contrast, in most parts of the Midwest and Northeast, racist covenants targeted African Americans in response to the Great Migrations of World War I and World War II.

By studying not only the challenges that people of color faced in Reno’s twentieth century housing market, but also the strategies they used to make homes here despite such challenges, we can arrive at a better understanding of our nation’s recent past and its present. The poster will feature an ArcGIS map of covenanted properties, a chronological graph of racist covenants, photography, and text.