Wake County launches map of historic racially restrictive covenants

Wake County has put a searchable map online that lets residents see where racially restrictive covenants were written into local property records and open the historic deeds that carried them. The county says the tool covers roughly 14,500 deeds, giving people a way to check their own neighborhoods and see how exclusion was embedded in Wake County’s land records for generations.

The project took nearly three years and drew on nearly 200 volunteers who helped scan, search, index and map about 600,000 pages from roughly 20,000 deeds. County materials say the archive work produced about 10,000 hours of unpaid labor and used optical character recognition to make the records searchable. The county now says the map is live and can be used to search addresses, explore neighborhoods and read the underlying deed language.

Wake County launched the effort in 2023 after completing its Enslaved Person Project, with Register of Deeds Tammy Brunner overseeing the work alongside project managers Lisa Boccetti and Robert Williams. County officials said they documented the process so other jurisdictions could replicate it, and the project was presented to the Wake County Board of Commissioners in March 2025 before the public release this May.

The county’s materials place the records in their legal context as well. Racially restrictive covenants were ruled unenforceable by the U.S. Supreme Court in Shelley v. Kraemer in 1948 and later outlawed by the federal Fair Housing Act of 1968, but Wake County says the language still survives in many recorded deeds, subdivision records and even some cemeteries. An October 2023 WUNC report described the clauses as a widespread but hidden feature of property books, including language that barred anyone other than white people from using or occupying property except domestic servants.

Wake County says the map is more than an archive. Officials frame it as a public accounting of how discriminatory rules shaped neighborhoods, wealth-building and access to housing across the county, with effects that can still show up in lower income, reduced access to services and weaker opportunities for generational wealth in some communities. The county’s resources page points readers to the National Covenants Research Coalition and to books by Karen Benjamin, Carmen Wimberley Cauthen, Kenneth T. Jackson, Richard Rothstein and Leah Rothstein, underscoring that the local project is tied to a broader national history of segregation and housing discrimination.

For researchers, planners, students and homeowners, the county also offers downloadable data with grantor, grantee, execution date and property description fields, along with polygon data on Wake County Open Data updated in March 2026. Some covenant records could not yet be placed on the map, but the county says the public can now see where discriminatory language was formally embedded in Wake County land records and what that history left behind.