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‘Whites only’ covenants on home titles can be removed

Real estate agent offers to help strip racist artifacts

A number of homes in the Edgemoor neighborhood
A number of homes in the Edgemoor neighborhood (Hailey Hoffman/Cascadia Daily News)
By Kai Uyehara News Intern

Real estate agent Matt Goldman was stunned to discover racist covenants on property titles in the coveted Edgemoor neighborhood that once allowed only white homeowners.

Now, he’s helping owners remove the restrictions that were outlawed by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1948. 

“We’re trying to grow as a community and be an inclusive community,” Goldman said. “This has no place on a home title.”

Such covenants have remained in property titles across America, underscoring the country’s troublesome history with race. They are easy to miss among pages of legal jargon recorded on the original sale of plots of land, such as those in Edgemoor. 

Goldman, 42, first found the covenants in 2019 while running a preliminary title report on an Edgemoor home. The more titles Goldman looked through, the more restrictive covenants he discovered. 

Goldman, a Bellingham real estate agent for six years, has found about 25 house deeds with racist restrictions and has received twice as many requests from Edgemoor homeowners wishing to remove the language. He also has found racist covenants in the King Mountain and Columbia neighborhoods.

Goldman said the racist language in Bellingham is from the 1920s to the 1950s. The covenants are a remnant of an era Bellingham has tried to leave behind.

photo  Matt Goldman, 42, a Bellingham real estate agent for six years, has been working to remove racist covenants from local property titles in city neighborhoods. (Photo courtesy of Matt Goldman)  

“These things really matter, not only when a Black person is trying to buy a house in Edgemoor, they matter in terms of thinking about representation,” said Josh Cerretti, Western Washington University history professor. “They symbolically matter because we can see clearly the way that white supremacy has shaped our experience of this place.”

Northwest racial issues date to the 1840s with the Black exclusionary law when Washington was part of the Oregon territory, Cerretti said. While the law banned slavery, the region prohibited Black people from living in the territory for more than three years.


Cerretti said few Black people made early Bellingham a long-term residence and those who did mostly worked as servants in the homes of white people.

Bellingham’s racist history is broader than home covenants. According to a Western study the town expelled Chinese residents in 1855, drove South Asians away in 1907, and like many other parts of the Northwest, was a hub for the Ku Klux Klan during the 1920s. 

The town in the 1950s also became a so-called Sundown Town — a reference to the practice in the 1950s of requiring Black people to leave a city before sunset to discourage their residency.

Cerretti discovered racist covenants in Edgemoor seven years ago when researching housing discrimination in the Pacific Northwest. He said addressing the racist covenant issue “is a step in the right direction but it’s just the first step in terms of actually making this a welcoming place for Black and African American people.”

Goldman said homeowners hoping to address racial restrictions on deeds can contact him at his website. He has offered to help figure out if deeds have racist language, get original documents and fill out the necessary forms the auditor’s office needs to erase the offensive phrases.

“I’m not just going and looking into anybody’s title,” Goldman said. “I’m really specifically working on the people that have raised their hand and said let’s do something about this.”

In 2019, Washington state officials provided a restrictive covenant modification form to nullify the restrictions from house deeds. A new state law this year requires homeowners to disclose restrictive covenants before selling a house. 

“I think that people have tried to do things in the past, but now Washington state has actually given us an opportunity to nullify and denounce that racist language,” Goldman said.

Another option for Washington homeowners is to preserve the racist language in order to call attention to the past. State lawmakers recently allowed homeowners to transfer the language from their deed into a separate file held at an auditor’s office. 

“We want to make sure that we approach the removal of these (covenants) in a way that doesn’t erase the fact that racism happens,” Cerretti said.

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