In the early days of my marriage to Judi, we experienced a windfall.
When she was small, her grandfather bequeathed her and two other relatives a plot of land, in an undeveloped part of Florida. Her section was never worth more than about $500.00, for about half an acre (I think). Then, for a few months, during a real estate speculation boom, the eyes of developers turned to anything that could possibly be valuable, and we started getting letters offering us greater and greater amounts for this really pointless piece of property. It passed $10,000, $20,000, $30,000, with dizzying alacrity. We knew that at a certain point it would drop just as precipitously, and in the end, showing not-quite-perfect timing, we accepted one of the offers a few weeks before receiving what would turn out to be the highest one. And then the powers that be realized that the land really wasn’t good for anything and the next few offers we received, before the ownership database updated, showed the value declining at a speed approximately twice as fast as the appreciation before it.
As I say, the timing was not QUITE perfect. But the money came in handy.
But before the sale, Judi showed me the now-yellowing deed.
It included a provision, for which her grandfather could not be blamed — it was then the requirement of the location — that at no point in the future would the land ever be sold to any black people.
It was peering through a window at a more savage time. And one incomprehensible to me, on a logical level, even if you put the idiotic premises of racism aside. Okay, so you’re such a rampaging bigot that you don’t want to sell your land to a black person – as if their money is no good; let us buy that. In what way does it hurt you that the person you’ve sold it to will someday sell it to a black person? I suppose that if you’re “protecting the neighborhood” it makes a sick kind of logic if you fear the re-sale imminent…but if, as in this case, the deed yellows in a drawer for forty years?
Whatever. By the time we sold the land, that provision would have been unenforceable anyway. We don’t know the race of the buyer or of the current owner, if different, nor do we care.
But if we could go back in time and talk to whoever was responsible for ensuring that deeds for real estate in that area contained that noxious provision, what would they tell us?
That they were just protecting their deeply-held personal beliefs.
That they were within their rights to do so.
That we would be oppressing them by objecting.
Fifty years later, now, we can tell them that they’re irrelevant, that their deeply-held personal beliefs did not trump the rights of others, and that we owe them nothing but scorn and pity.
This has been a message to the bureaucrats and tradesmen now seeking to preserve their right to discriminate.
Faster than your worst fears, you too will wind up a relic in some drawer, object of nothing but scorn and pity from the generations that come after you.
Comment By: Jean Rossner
July 9th, 2015 at 11:18 am
Lovely. Thank you for sharing it.
Comment By: Lauretta Nagel
July 9th, 2015 at 12:19 pm
Wow. Talk about mixed emotions.
Comment By: Michael A. Burstein
July 9th, 2015 at 1:18 pm
The house I grew up in had a covenant document from when it was first built in the 1920s, indicating that it was not to be sold to certain types of people. The code words used were meant to indicate that it could not be sold to Blacks or Jews.
As of now, one down, one to go. 🙂
Comment By: Deborah Dormitzer
July 9th, 2015 at 2:23 pm
Last lines of that story — oh snap!
Comment By: George Peterson
July 9th, 2015 at 2:33 pm
There’s a dimension of which you might not be aware. The US Government began subsidizing the sale of real estate in the 1930’s as part of the fight against the Great Depression. After WWII, this went into high gear because of the fear that the post-war economy would collapse. It was probably the largest transfer of wealth in human history, helping to create the post-war boom and, to this day, much of the wealth of the middle-class is in their homes. It lead to the growth of the suburbs.
Most people know something about this. What they don’t know is that it was for “White” People only. Blacks could not get this government assistance. (Hispanics and Southeast Asians were also discriminated against to varying degrees.) And it wasn’t even that they couldn’t get low cost loans, White People would have trouble getting loans if there were any Blacks living in the neighborhood. If even one Black family moved because they’d worked hard and saved up enough to buy a house, it could cause property values to plummet, simply because it literally became harder to sell the property.
You don’t have to be a genius to see that the implications of this were or why so many of the problems we have today stem from this BS. People, both Black & White, aren’t totally stupid and they saw what was happening and it was a big part of the Civil Rights Movement. Eventually the laws were changed, although “Redlining” is still a big problem in the Real Estate and Home Loan Industries.
But when Judi’s forebear put that in the deed, it wasn’t just a matter of personal discrimination, it was a consequence of direct Government fuckery.
Comment By: Ann Cohrs
July 9th, 2015 at 3:19 pm
I grew up in a house that had covenant restrictions on it. White people of good character only (read Christian). When a Korean doctor moved next door in the EIGHTIES, some neighbors were outraged.