Racial covenants – widespread in Mason District – can be removed

You probably aren’t aware of this but if you’re a homeowner in the Annandale/Mason District area, there’s a strong likelihood that your property has a restrictive covenant prohibiting non-White ownership.

Racial covenants are illegal and non-enforceable, but many are still in the deed books.

The Fairfax County Board of Supervisors approved a Board Matter in September directing the county attorney to file a formal release of such covenants in the county’s land records. It also directed staff, in coordination with the Clerk of Court, to review other property deeds to county-owned properties to identify any additional unlawful racial covenants.

To see if your property has a racial covenant, look up your neighborhood on this map.

Here are some examples:

• A covenant for Courtland Park in Bailey’s Crossroads approved in 1938 states: “That the said lots or any interest therein shall not be sold, leased, conveyed, devised to or occupy by any person not of the Caucasian Race.”

• A covenant recorded in 1948 for Lincolnia Park states: “No one of said lots, nor any parts thereof, shall ever be sold, leased, devised, or conveyed to anyone not of the Caucasian Race.”

• A 1940 covenant for Accotink Heights in Annandale bars any lots from being “occupied by, sold, leased, devised, conveyed or in any manner alienated to any person of the Negro race,” with an exception for “domestic servants of the Negro race.”

Among the many other neighborhoods in Annandale/Mason District with racial covenants: Columbia Pines, Alpine, Annandale Acres, and Strathmeade Springs in Annandale; Pinecrest in Lincolnia; Ravenwood and Buffalo Hill in Seven Corners; Rock Spring in Bailey’s Crossroads; and Westlawn in Falls Church.

In the Northern Virginia suburbs, racial covenants in property deeds were one of the ways segregated neighborhoods were created in Fairfax County from the early 1900s until they were prohibited by the Fair Housing Act of 1968.

The board matter was sponsored by Supervisor Dan Storck (Mount Vernon) jointly with other supervisors.

“This legacy of racial discrimination is a stain on our communities that historically will never go away,” Storck told Annandale Today. “While Virginia Code § 36-96.6 declares that racial covenants are void by operation of law, and while the county could not and would not seek to enforce them under any circumstance, my colleagues and I were compelled to go further to right this injustice.”

“We directed county staff to research and remove these covenants from all county-owned land deeds, as well as educate the community as to how to remove racial covenants from their own land deeds,” Storck said.

Storck and Supervisor Rodney Lusk (Franconia) had attended a lecture this summer on racial covenants in Fairfax County by Krystyn Moon, a professor of history and American studies at the University of Mary Washington.

When Moon started researching racial covenants, she was surprised there are so many.

Racial covenants spread in Northern Virginia in conjunction with the growth of suburbanization in the 1930s and 40s, Moon said. That growth was spurred by the expansion of the federal government and increased road building.

Many subdivisions were built in the inner suburbs, such as Annandale, during that period, so those neighborhoods are more likely to have racial covenants than newer neighborhoods farther out.  

At a workshop in October hosted by Virginia Senate Majority Leader Scott Surovell and Del. Paul Krizek, Moon discussed the history of racial covenants and explained how to remove them.

A law enacted by the Virginia legislature in 2020 made the process a little easier, she said. But homeowners still have to search for the original deed with the offending language, record the page in the deed book, and fill out a legal form from the Fairfax County Circuit Court.

Any individual can do this for their own property, but you can’t do it for someone else’s property, Moon said.

If you want to remove a covenant for a whole neighborhood, all the residents have to sign a legal instrument and they will need a real estate attorney.

Moon found one instance of an Annandale neighborhood that had done this. William Smar developed Elcino Manor – consisting of 11 homes on Willow Run Drive – in 1951. He had the racial covenant removed in 1954.

“The response from the community at the workshop was pretty positive,” Moon said. That session highlighted how systemic racial covenants were. “It’s hard to see how systemic it is unless you actually map it. That makes it much more impactful.”

Moon’s racial covenant identification project, “Exclusion & Resilience in NoVA,” is a work in progress, with more covenants expected to be added to the map. Moon and her colleagues at Mary Washington are part of the National Covenants Research Coalition, which is documenting the history of exclusion nationwide.

The legacy of racial covenants are still with us, Moon said. “Those deeds rolled back any momentum for Black residents to become renters or homeowners in Fairfax County.”

Racial covenants were just one of the tools used to maintain segregation, she said, along with road expansion that divided communities, zoning ordinances, eminent domain for the construction of schools, public housing construction, and restricted access to mortgages.

When Little River Turnpike was widened and Interstate 395 was built, African American homeowners were displaced. “When they lost property to those projects, it’s not like they could buy property elsewhere,” Moon said.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Shelley v. Kraemer in 1948 that racial covenants were legal, but unenforceable. “That started to unravel his process,” she said.

The most recent racial covenant Moon found in Fairfax County was in 1957 in Chesterbrook Woods in McLean. The most recent one in the City of Alexandria was recorded in 1962.

The federal Fair Housing Act of 1968 made racial covenants illegal along with other forms of discrimination. Fairfax County passed its own fair housing rule a few months later, with an “open occupancy ordinance.” Virginia enacted a fair housing law in 1972.