UB law students examine racially discriminatory deeds in WNY

BUFFALO, N.Y. – The University at Buffalo School of Law’s Civil Rights and Transparency Clinic, in partnership with HOME (Housing Opportunities Made Equal), will host a public education event with discussion on their findings of discriminatory and illegal racial covenants in house deeds for the greater Buffalo area.

The event will take place at 7 p.m. on Saturday, Dec. 7, at Burning Books, 420 Connecticut St., Buffalo.

Racial covenants are legally binding restrictions in a homeowner’s deed that deny ownership or occupation based on a person’s race.

Student attorneys in the law school clinic have been conducting original historic research into past use of such covenants in the deeds of Buffalo-area homes. While the covenants can no longer be enforced due to modern-day anti-discrimination laws, they represent a troubling persistence of legally sanctioned racism.

“The use of these covenants has had widespread implications for our society,” says the clinic’s director Heather Abraham, an associate professor of law. “It is one of the ways that property law has been used to separate people, and those patterns have calcified. We see the consequences on our neighborhoods today – they’re fairly easy to trace.

“Courts have recognized that there’s unique and irreparable damage when someone encounters written or published evidence that another person seeks to deny them housing because of their race or ethnicity.”

Law students Khalia Muir and Chris Flynn, along with fair housing researcher, James Coughlin, will present their findings and recommendations at Saturday’s public forum.

“In the City of Good Neighbors, our history is riddled with harmful efforts to separate neighbors by race. We are two aspiring lawyers and a fair housing researcher, embarking on a journey to learn our community’s past and use the law to repair the damage. One virulent device is a racially restrictive covenant,” the student attorneys say.

For example, the students found the following language in a Town of Tonawanda’s Lincoln Park Village deed, drafted in 1947: “No person of any race other than the Caucasian race shall use or occupy any building on any lot except that this covenant shall not prevent occupancy by domestic servants of a different race domiciled with an owner or tenant.”