White Reaction to Black Migration: Racial Property Restrictions in Iowa

Colin Gordon, University of Iowa
Ashley Howard, University of Iowa

The Midwest, a key destination of the Great Migrations and a region which remains coded in the national imagination as all-white, quadrupled its African American population between 1910 and 1950. While much has been written about the influx of nearly 2.5 million people in the region’s Great Lakes metros (Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland), by shifting attention west of the Mississippi, the practice and process of segregation in smaller cities come into focus. We examine white reactions to Black migration in Iowa, through an analysis of racial property restrictions in two of the state’s metropolitan counties. Reflecting the uneven accessibility of the original records, this project employs a mixed methods approach. The Linn County (Cedar Rapids) documents are fully digitized, allowing us to employ an iterative “distance reading” to identify restricted properties. The Polk County (Des Moines) records are only available in the original hardbound deed books or on microfilm, forcing us to rely on labor-intensive archival research to identify restrictions. OCR searching of the Cedar Rapids records yields a comprehensive catalogue of restrictions over a fifty-year span; ‘close reading” of the Des Moines records yields patterns (subdivisions, grantors, language) that serve as leads for further research. For both data sets, information on timing, target, terms, and location of restriction are matched at the parcel level to current property databases. This record of private restriction informs—temporally and spatially—our understanding of local policies (schooling, planning, land-use zoning), federal policies (redlining, urban renewal), and the racialized construction of an all-white region. Both the practice of private restriction and the segregation it accomplished galvanized a response from local African American communities and activists. We close the paper with a discussion of the “long shadow” of private restriction in civil rights and fair housing battles in both cities that continue to the present day.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 5. The Politics of Urban Exclusion