The Ink That Binds: The Diffusion of Racial Covenants in 1920s Milwaukee

• In Event: Community and Urban Sociology Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 3: Housing Policy

Abstract

This study examines the spatial diffusion of racially restrictive covenants in Milwaukee, Wisconsin during the 1920s. Racial covenants (RC) —legal clauses in property deeds barring non-White ownership or occupancy—were paramount for segregation between 1917 and 1930, covering nearly 50% of white-owned homes by 1928 (Handley & Bonds, 2024). While most scholarship focuses on cities with large Black populations (Gordon, 2023), Milwaukee’s industrial, immigrant-heavy, and historically low-Black context offers a unique case for analysis. This study applies three sociological frameworks—racial threat, racial capitalism, and ethnic projects—to explain spatial patterns of RC segregation. Racial threat predicts clustering where Black populations are high, and segregation is low. Racial capitalism anticipates RC on the urban fringe in high-value, new developments. Ethnic projects theory expects RC in majority-ethnic White neighborhoods, like German enclaves, where Whiteness was constructed through civic nationalism. Using U.S. Census data, the Mapping Racism and Resistance project, and spatial analysis in Microsoft Excel and ArcGIS Pro, preliminary 1920s data partially support racial capitalism and ethnic projects’ theories. RC clustered in new developments on the urban fringe and in German-descended neighborhoods, emphasizing Whiteness and citizenship, within the city core. This proposal propounds to further test these patterns through OLS and spatial regression modeling. Methodologically, the project builds a hand-curated Milwaukee census database from Ancestry.com scrutinizing theory-driven OLS models with HAC standard errors and spatial autocorrelation diagnostics in R. It advances understanding of RC and segregation by focusing on the co-production of race and space in early 20th-century urban Midwest.

Author

• Elizaveta Ilinichna Lepikhova, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee