OLYMPIA, Wash. — The Washington State Supreme court ruled Thursday that county auditors cannot remove racial covenants from a home's title and deed from the public record.
The ruling comes from a case in Spokane County in which property owner Alex May sought to have racial covenants, language in home titles that made it illegal for people of color to live there, removed from the title to his property and from public records.
According to a unanimous opinion from the Washington state Supreme Court, May and his wife bought the property in 2017 “subject to covenants, conditions, restrictions and easements, if any, affecting title, which may appear in public record." May then filed a complaint for declaratory relief against Spokane County in 2018 seeking to have the racial covenant voided from the title of the property and public records.
The covenant, which dates back to declarations filed in 1953, reads, "No race or nationality other than the white race shall use or occupy any building on any lot."
Both the Spokane County trial court and the Court of Appeals found that the statute does not allow the covenant to be removed, but does allow for an order voiding the covenant to be filed with the title.
“We must ensure that future generations have access to these documents because, although the covenants are morally repugnant, they are part of a documented history of disenfranchisement of a people,” Justice G. Helen Whitener wrote in the Supreme Court's unanimous opinion. ”It is our history.”
Before May's case reached the state Supreme Court, the Washington state Legislature amended a law surrounding racial covenants. Under the new law, property owners are allowed to seek "judicial remedy" to remove the covenants from the title.
The amended law also states that removing the language should not prevent preservation of the law for "historical or archival purposes."
Whitener wrote that the Legislature's amendments allow a physical record of racial covenants to be maintained while also allowing property owners to remove the covenants from their chains of title.
She added that removing all evidence of the racial covenants would not follow the state Legislature's intent to eradicate discrimination, but would instead destroy physical evidence that discrimination existed.
“It would be all too easy for future generations to look back at these property records with no physical evidence of the discriminatory covenants and conclude that the covenants never existed at all," she wrote in the collective opinion.