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“Intentional harm demands acknowledgment and intentional repair,” State Sen. Lydia Edwards said.
Hundreds of “dirty deeds” in North Shore communities are being “cleaned” of racist and discriminatory language that has been passed on for decades.
The Southern Essex Registry of Deeds recorded its first round of affidavits to remove “discriminatory restrictive covenants” from property deeds along the North Shore, register Eileen Duff said in a statement.
“Today we recorded the first 13 affidavits, marking the beginning of our process of cleaning every dirty deed in our district,” Duff said July 21.
About 600 “dirty deeds” were identified by nonprofit Harborlight Homes and the North Shore NAACP, according to Duff. Another 200 were identified by legal interns from the University of Massachusetts Law School in Dartmouth.
Andrew DeFranza, the executive director of Harborlight Homes, said his organization worked with the NAACP to use a University of Minnesota algorithm to search for discriminatory language in the deeds. The search returned hundreds in just Southern Essex.
“The premises … shall not be owned or occupied by any person of Negro, Jewish, Italian, Greek, Polish or Armenian blood,” a deed from Nahant reads, according to Harborlight. Another deed in Lynnfield notes that the premises won’t be occupied by someone “not of the Caucasian race,” and another says the same but leaves an exemption for “domestic servants of other races.”
Other deeds, such as in Marblehead and Beverly, single out “persons of negro blood” or “colored persons,” according to the nonprofit.
Most of the language dates to between the 1920s and the 1950s, DeFranza said, and Saugus in particular was home to a significant cluster of the “dirty deeds.” While the language isn’t enforceable, DeFranza said the project’s goal is to remove the language while acknowledging its historical existence.
“The registrar, before he retired, actually created a note with our help to add to each of those deeds so people knew it was there historically as a way to acknowledge history,” DeFranza said, “which is part of what you need to be able to reconcile and move forward.”
State Sen. Lydia Edwards, who represents Boston and part of the North Shore, celebrated the deed cleaning last month. She is behind a legislative effort to “streamline this process across the Commonwealth, removing racially restrictive language used for centuries to deny housing to various groups.” The proposed law would allow recorder’s officers to issue a new certificate of title or add a memorandum to deeds.
“Thank you to Register Duff for her unwavering support and advocacy to remove Dirty Deeds,” Edwards said on social media. “Intentional harm demands acknowledgment and intentional repair. This bill is one step in that direction.”
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(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by PostX News and is published from a syndicated feed.)
