The Fall 2021 Community Read, Racial Covenants: The Continuing Legacy of Exclusionary Housing Practices in Albemarle County, focuses on the histories and impacts of racial covenants in Albemarle County and the surrounding communities. Click the link above, or the graphic to the right to access the reader.

This reader focuses on the continuing collective legacies of racially restrictive covenants on our Albemarle-Charlottesville community. It features:

• A C-Ville Weekly article about Charlottesville,
• the Albemarle County Equity Profile from the UVA Equity Center & the Albemarle County Office of Equity and Inclusion. This report focuses on measures of well-being and how it is distributed and experienced throughout our community, and
• the Orange Dot Report 4.0 from Piedmont Virginia Community College’s Network2Work@PVCC, which focuses on understanding family self-sufficiency in our region and where we fall short.

What is a racial covenant?

A racial covenant is a type of restrictive covenant – a binding legal obligation between buyer and seller - that can be written into the deed of a property contract by the seller. Failure to obey a restrictive covenant can result in penalties against the buyer. While covenants restrict only individual properties, use of racial covenants became widespread throughout the country beginning in the 1920s, barring properties from being sold to people of specific races or ethnicities—most often targeting Black Americans. In 1948, the Supreme Court ruled in Shelley v. Kramer that covenants were unenforceable, and Virginia’s Fair Housing Law now prohibits such covenants.  

Our thanks to Jordy Yager & C-ville Weekly, Siri Russell, Dr. Barbara Brown Wilson, Dr. Michele Claibourn, Alissa Ujie Diamond, Sam Powers, Michael Salgueiro & The Equity Center, Ridge Schuyler & Piedmont Virginia Community College, & Karen Waters-Wicks for their scholarship.