Mapping Prejudice Project Granted Access to Stearns Co. Records

ST. CLOUD (WJON News) -- A project to uncover racially restrictive covenants is expanding into Stearns County.

The Mapping Prejudice Project is based out of the University of Minnesota. They started by looking for covenants in Hennepin County. It has grown to now 12 counties in Minnesota.

Brittany Merritt Nash is an Assistant Professor of History at the College of St. Benedict and St. John's University. She says her students began working on this project a few years ago, but now that they have permission from the county they'll be able to dig deeper into historical records.

Racial covenants in Stearns County, we already know that there were at least 100 of them. Students at St. Ben's/St. John's did research using the Stearns County historic property deeds database in 2023, and they found about 100. So, they know that they existed here in at least six different neighborhoods.

Merritt Nash says they'll now be able to run the county's historical property records through the updated Mapping Prejudice Project software system to catch the records that might have been missed initially.

Great River Covenants Project

She says her students started learning about racial covenants in their other classes.

They were learning about them in Chicago, Minneapolis, and Los Angeles, racial covenants existed everywhere in the United States. So, they were curious how many existed here in Stearns County where they live and where they learn.

Racially restrictive covenants prevented people who were not white from owning property and were legally enforced from about 1910 until 1968 when Congress passed the Fair Housing Act.

Developers tended to put racial covenants on entire neighborhoods. They would develop a neighborhood and then insert racial covenant clauses on all the deeds in that neighborhood. The idea was that this would safeguard the property values of that neighborhood.

Merritt Nash says when their research is complete there will be a map made public so you'll be able to see if you live in a neighborhood that used to have one of these covenants.