Inga Selders, a city council member in a suburb of Kansas City, wanted to know if there were provisions preventing homeowners from legally having backyard chickens. So she combed through deeds in the county recorder’s office for two days looking for specific language.
At one point, she stumbled across some language, but it had nothing to do with chickens.
“I heard the rumors, and there it was,” Selders recalled. “It was disgusting. It made my stomach turn to see it there in black-and-white.”
What Selders found was a racially restrictive covenant in the Prairie Village Homeowners Association property records that says, “None of said land may be conveyed to, used, owned, or occupied by negroes as owners or tenants.” The covenant applied to all 1,700 homes in the homeowners association, she said.
Racial covenants, still on the books in virtually every state, are hard to erase : NPR
