I’ve lived in the Mary Dell neighborhood of Durham, North Carolina for over 13 years. My family is one of the very few Black families in a mostly white neighborhood.
So, outside of my four walls, I rarely see anyone who looks like me. At neighborhood events over the years, we've gotten some surprised looks when we say where we live. It made me wonder, why is my neighborhood so white?
To start looking for answers, I went to J.T. Tabron, Durham’s assistant register of deeds. Tabron took me inside the public deed vault, which is full of legal documents that trace the ownership of a property from one person to another. He showed me deeds that had racial covenants — rules specifically designed to restrict or create conditions around a group of people’s right to live on a property. Some of the covenants focused on excluding people of color from housing unless they were maids or butlers. Other covenants kept Black people from being buried in certain cemeteries.
Tabron works with the organization Hacking Into History. The group is working to transcribe and identify all racially restrictive covenants in Durham County property deeds in order to map them for a public exhibition and encourage community dialogue.
Tabron says the "main goal is to educate and empower citizens willing to come together and engage this shared history and its impact, with reach into today.”
“That's the value of history. When you look through it, you can recreate what the world was like when you weren't there. I think that there's a value in projects like these,” Tabron said. “You may not necessarily have the time to come down to the Register of Deeds office and look through 200 years of history. However, just because one doesn't know what's there, doesn't mean that it didn't happen.”
I thought the racial makeup of my neighborhood might be a result of racial covenants. However, Mary Dell was founded in the late eighties and early nineties, and by that time the Fair Housing Act of 1968 was in place — which made it illegal to discriminate with housing based on race. Therefore, racial covenants were banned. But racial covenants were not the only tactic that led to housing segregation in Durham and across the country.
“There are neighborhoods in Durham that, when they were originally designed, a lot of the promotional material was designed very clearly to speak to certain groups of people,” Tabron says.
Tabron brought up other practices used to keep people of color out of neighborhoods. Like redlining, when banks refuse to give loans to finance houses in particular areas based on the ethnicity or racial make-up of that community. Or steering, when real estate agents direct people toward or away from neighborhoods based on race.
“So your neighborhood itself might not have any clearly defined or racially restrictive covenants. However, the things that happened previously, right, [made it so] minorities didn't live here, and only a certain group did," Tabron said. "These people might have been relatively well to do, and so you’ve got economic factors that were built on these discrimination factors that might keep certain groups out.”
Before I left the Register of Deeds office, I got Tabron to show me some history of my house, like the fact that my neighborhood was originally farmland. I learned that the developer Southland Associates originally scouted out the land, and Spencer Harrell Incorporated built my house. I got to view my plat map, which is cool because it showed me the developer’s vision for my neighborhood. However, I still didn’t know why my neighborhood was so white. So I decided to talk to my mom.
“I think when we first got here, it never occurred to me that the neighborhood wouldn't be diverse, because it's Durham. We were literally moving about a couple of miles away," my mother says. "We went from one neighborhood to the next. [Our old] neighborhood was so diverse. It never occurred to me that Mary Dell wouldn't be.”
I decided to talk to one of my neighbors, DeeDee Riffe, to get her perspective on diversity in Mary Dell.
“Well, having lived on the earth 73 years, I have to say money is one variable," Riffe says. "There are neighborhoods where Black people live in big houses, but they wanted to be around other Black people. So that's a variable, a choice of wanting to be with people who look like you."
I don’t think the lack of diversity in Mary Dell is intentional, but historical housing practices caused by systemic racism could be affecting its demographics. So I talked to my HOA Vice President, Melodie Pugh, to find out whether our HOA has ever considered inclusivity or Durham’s racially-defining history.
I asked Pugh if the neighborhood's demographic was always the way it is now, and how she views change in Mary Dell.
“Well, if I can speak to that point, I think we're in a world today where there's a Black-skinned girl here, holding this microphone, and I'm white-skinned. I can't change our history and our country,” Pugh says. “Let's fix where we are today, instead of continually going back. That's my philosophy as an older adult. I can't change what happened with your ancestors.”
I agree that moving forward is important, and hopefully, it starts with having conversations like these, so we can understand each other's experiences. If I’ve learned anything from my research, it’s that you can’t correct the future without acknowledging the past.
“Don't dismiss the echoes of history right?,” Tabron says. “Don't just be like ‘Ah, those things were bad.' It is easy to wash one's hands of things that have happened previously, and just look forward… especially if you're one of the people who benefited from the history, right?”
So, it turns out, there isn’t a simple answer to why my neighborhood is so white. Whatever the reason, I learned a lot from having conversations with my neighbors, and I hope they learned something from my experience.
