Homeowners write out racism in residential property deeds

Growing up in Lansing, Ingham County Register of Deeds Derrick Quinney has seen racism on multiple levels — from neighbors, from the state and from laws that told his family where they were and were not allowed to live. 

He recalled how as a child, court-ordered busing for desegregation took him to a school on the other side of town and how the construction of Interstate 496 tore through predominantly Black neighborhoods.

He also knows about the history of restrictive covenants: housing provisions put into place to keep neighborhoods legally segregated. 

“From the standpoint of an individual like myself, I remember the days when my mother or my father would take my grandmother, and my mother also, to scrub and clean the floors in the houses with those restrictions that we couldn’t live there,” Quinney said. 

Now, as the only African American register of deeds in the state of Michigan and one of just a few across the country, he was a key voice in shaping a new state law to make it easier for property owners to remove those covenants from their records. 

Under the statute, signed by Gov. Gretchen Whitmer in December, Michiganders may expunge such language from their residential deeds of sale. 

The “Discharge of Prohibited Restrictive Covenants Act,” which state Sen. Sarah Anthony, D-Lansing, began working on in 2018 as a state representative, simplifies the removal process and requires homeowner associations to act if home or property owners request them to remove a restrictive covenant.

Quinney and Anthony have planned a “restrictive covenants removal fair” from 2 p.m. to 3 p.m. Monday (Feb. 27) at the Register of Deeds Office in the Ingham County Courthouse, 315 S. Jefferson St. in Mason. Ingham County residents are encouraged to bring deeds that include discriminatory language. 

While many might see the removal of a restrictive covenant as nothing more than symbolic, since they were made illegal by Congress in the Fair Housing Act of 1968, Quinney said that for him, the new law is of deeper importance. 

“I’ve heard folks say, ‘Oh, it’s just symbolic, it’s just ceremonial, it doesn’t mean anything, it has no significance to it,’” he said. “For those individuals, they tend to be those that are privileged, they’ve made their career through nepotism and also generational wealth.” 

Restrictive covenants are no longer a means of keeping minorities from owning property, but the hateful words often remain in property documents and can be a reminder of a time where racism still had a hold on how the state and the country were run. 

Anthony credited Quinney’s efforts with being a key part of getting the legislation across the finish line. 

“He has been one of the champions in the room where no one looks like him to say, ‘This is an important thing, we do need to make sure that we’re not uplifting a legacy of racism in this state,’” she said. “That’s been a hard battle for him.” 

Quinney, 66, gave credit to the Michigan Association of Registers of Deeds for also supporting the legislation. 

Anthony said that she learned more about restrictive covenants through her own home-buying journey and from previous iterations of the bill that failed in the state Legislature. The history connected to restrictive covenants motivated her to get it done. 

“It’s not a coincidence that poverty is concentrated into certain pockets of our region, that Black and brown folks were forced to live in certain areas of Lansing, and were prohibited from living in certain areas, particularly in our suburban community,” she said. “We know that that has a lasting legacy on generational wealth, on the ability to pass down properties, what it does to property values. These types of steps ensure that we’re dismantling that legacy.” 

Bill Castanier, president of the Historical Society of Greater Lansing, said that restrictive covenants were often used as a form of racial discrimination in northern states like Michigan, as opposed to the outright segregation that took place in the South. He said the restrictive covenant on the deed to his Lansing home reads, “Only persons of the Caucasian Race shall have the right of habitation or dwelling in any of said premises.”

“The South had white and ‘colored’ drinking fountains,” Castanier said. “We didn’t have those in the North. You probably couldn’t ever find a photograph of those in any northern cities. 

“However, we did have these,” he said, referring to restrictive covenants. “This was probably the equivalent, but was worse, because it decided where you can live and it basically controlled your whole life.” 

The effort to get restrictive covenants removed has also been one that neighborhoods have tried to take on themselves in recent years, like East Lansing’s Brookfield neighborhood.

John Hays, an attorney who lives in the neighborhood, has been working on getting the language removed from neighborhood deeds for years. With owners of all 99 neighborhood lots needing to agree on amendments, getting anything changed can be a significant challenge. Properties in the neighborhood have existed since as early as 1924. Hays said that even though Brookfield’s racial restrictive covenants can’t be enforced, they’re still a “blight” on the neighborhood. 

“If my wife and I wanted to sell our house and the new purchasers got a copy of the restrictions, the covenants and saw this one, they’d say, “Oh, we don’t want to live in a place like this,’” Hays said. “It’s unconstitutional, it’s illegal, but still, it looks bad.” 

While many restrictive covenants in the Lansing area were race-based, Anthony said that examples of religious and sex-based restrictive covenants can also be seen today. 

For example, she said there are covenants under which “only men can actually own this home or live in this home unless they’re servants or unless they kind of belong to a woman,” Anthony said. “It is telling, especially when those men have daughters.” 

Quinney said that the removal of the language in restrictive covenants is still optional and that there will always be people who push back against the new law. He’s more focused on helping those who want to get their deeds changed — hence, next week’s fair. 

He said he’s been “pleasantly surprised” at how many people “can’t believe they exist and want to do something to correct” their deeds once they learn they have restrictive covenants.