Dec. 31, 2025, 5:03 a.m. CT
There is a house in the middle of North Fifth Street between West Vienna Avenue and West Keefe Avenue in the Harambee neighborhood.
According to the deed of the home, it must have either shingles, tiles or slate for the roofing, all buildings, including the porch, must be kept back 20 feet from the property boundary, and it cannot be “sold to or occupied by a colored person.”
The deed of this home includes a racially restrictive covenant. Racial covenants are clauses that have historically prevented people of color from owning or occupying property.
An ongoing study, titled Mapping Racism and Resistance, led by UW-Milwaukee professors Anne Bonds and Derek Handley examined and mapped 32,500 racial covenants in Milwaukee county between 1911 and 1960. While the study does not include the entire history of covenants in the county, researchers only found one racial covenant in the Harambee neighborhood.
The reason why there may only be one racially restrictive covenant in the neighborhood is unknown, and much of the context behind the property’s deed has been lost to time.
However, racial covenants were not the only means of preventing Black homebuyers from purchasing property. In some cases, Black homeownership was blocked by social segregation and unspoken agreements.
“You may not see the covenant, but people had it in their hearts,” said Clayborn Benson, local historian and founding director of the Wisconsin Black Historical Society.
The rise of racial covenants in Milwaukee during the Great Migration
Racially restrictive covenants began to increase in popularity across the United States around 1910, during the first half of the Great Migration, when millions of Black people moved away from the Jim Crow South to look for new opportunities.
However, Milwaukee saw slower growth in its Black population than cities like New York, Detroit and Chicago.
In 1910, there were fewer than 3,000 Black residents in Wisconsin, and 980 of them lived in Milwaukee, according to the Wisconsin Historical Society.
Milwaukee saw its largest increase in racial covenants between 1926 to 1931, and the sole covenant in Harambee was created in the middle of that surge in 1929.
By the 1930s, there were three times as many racial covenants in the county as there were Black residents living there.
Most of the covenants were created in the suburban west side of the city, according to the UW-Milwaukee study.
Between 1940 and 1960, the Black population in the city rose by more than 600% from about 8,800 to about 62,400, according to the 1963 Zeidler Report, which studied Black populations in the city.
During this surge in Black residents, a 1948 Supreme Court decision, Shelly v. Kraemer, effectively made racial covenants unenforceable, but many neighborhoods remained racially segregated, even though racial covenants were unlawful.
This caused many new Black migrants to settle in segregated pockets of the city near Walnut Street and south of West North Avenue – building upon the small but already established Black community on the city’s near-north side.
“Walnut Street provided that family unity, that idea of personal encouragement and support,” Benson said.
While Black residents found community, they were still greatly impacted by racial exclusion.
In the surrounding white neighborhoods, including modern-day Harambee, it was common practice not to sell homes to Black buyers, according to Steve Schaffer, lead archivist with the Milwaukee County Historical Society.
Benson said this happened in several ways, but one of the most common practices was to simply refuse to sell to a Black buyer.
Neighborhood associations also created racial restrictions in homeowner’s association agreements. These restrictions would not have shown up on deeds and often went unnoticed, according to Handley, UW-Milwaukee professor and co-lead of the Mapping Racism and Resistance project.
“It was very subtle, but very significant and important to [white residents] that they not have African Americans as neighbors,” Benson said.
Real estate practices discouraged Black buyers from white neighborhoods
Training for real estate agents in the early 1900s was similar to it is today, in the sense that agents were taught to provide the best house possible to their clients and prioritize their needs, according to Schaffer.
Real Estate Selling, a 1929 handbook published by the National Board of Realtors, said it is the “duty of the salesman to know the neighborhood and his city so thoroughly that he can give the buyer reliable information regarding these factors,” and “the salesman should never sell or attempt to sell a property which is obviously not suited to the prospect’s needs.”
Realtors would use this language not to show Black buyers homes in white neighborhoods because they viewed the Black buyers as a disruption to the fabric of those areas. This would supposedly make the Black buyers equally unhappy with neighbors who did not want them around, according to Schaffer.
“It is not a smoking gun, but in the context, it is telling,” Schaffer said.
In Milwaukee, efforts to exclude Black residents from white neighborhoods were often reinforced by city leaders.
In a 1924 Milwaukee Journal report, the City of Milwaukee Real Estate Board considered plans to restrict Black residents to an area on the near-west side of the city, to be named the “Black Belt.”
The plans were not officially accepted, but the Black residents of the city remained effectively restricted to the area around North 3rd Street to about North 12th Street and between about West State Street to about West North Avenue − popularly called the Sixth Ward.
There may be undiscovered racial covenants
While only one racial covenant was found in Harambee, it is possible that there are more that have not been uncovered or examined for racist language, according to Handley.
Both Handley and Bonds will continue their research to map racial covenants across Milwaukee.
The project’s timeframe is not entirely comprehensive with the historical records from Milwaukee County, but it is still a massive undertaking to document, exploring deeds between 1911 to 1960 with the help of 6,000 volunteers.
However, there could be racial covenants recorded before this timeframe, going back as far as 1835, according to the Milwaukee County Register of Deeds Office.
The mapping project is ongoing, and Handley and Bonds told the Journal Sentinel in November that their team will need an estimated $30,000 to complete the work.
The additional funds will support the project’s interactive website and a podcast series featuring research volunteers and families who experienced housing discrimination.
To donate, visit www.give.uwm.edu/mappingrr.
Everett Eaton covers Harambee for the Journal Sentinel’s Neighborhood Dispatch. Contact: ejeaton@usatodayco.com
Neighborhood Dispatch reporting is supported by Bader Philanthropies, Zilber Foundation, Journal Foundation, Northwestern Mutual Foundation, Greater Milwaukee Foundation, and reader contributions to the Journal Sentinel Community-Funded Journalism Project. Journal Sentinel editors maintain full editorial control over all content. To support this work, visit jsonline.com/support. Checks can be addressed to Local Media Foundation (memo: “JS Community Journalism”) and mailed to P.O. Box 85015, Chicago, IL 60689
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