In January 2007, I wrote a column about the racist covenants Duke once inserted into the deeds of faculty homes in the Duke Forest. Those clauses prohibited persons of "Negro blood" from owning (or even sleeping in) 232 houses. Then in March 2007, I followed up with an even angrier missive demanding corrective action from President Richard Brodhead and his senior administrators.
Today, I write to review the unsatisfactory half-measures Brodhead has finally taken.
But first, some background: Racist covenants banning the sale of homes to blacks were declared unconstitutional in 1948. Nevertheless, Duke continued inserting them into faculty deeds until 1969, fully 21 years after they had been struck down. Though legally unenforceable, the presence of these racist covenants remains an outrage and I believe Duke has a moral responsibility to do everything it possibly can to erase this stain on our institutional history.
Unfortunately, the recent actions of Brodhead and University Counsel Pam Bernard fall far below that threshold.
Brodhead did take an important first step forward when he directed Bernard to file documents waiving Duke's right to enforce the covenants last fall. As Brodhead explained in a press release, that filing revised "each deed to disavow symbolically the language that is a reminder of the segregation of a past era."
But as former University counsel David Adcock noted in 2004, a "judicial declaration" was what was needed to fully cleanse homeowners' deeds of the racist language. Bernard's remedy, by contrast, is all symbol and no substance-and although I applaud the gesture, her actual filing is of extremely dubious merit.
With these legal documents, the University is effectively waiving enforcement rights it maintains it doesn't have. In fact, the University already reassured homeowners in both 1970 and 1989 "that Duke regrets the initial inclusion of the racially restrictive covenants, and will stipulate that it is not only legally impossible for the University to consider enforcing them, but that the university will not do so under any circumstances."
Waiving the right to do something that is already "legally impossible" hardly takes much courage.
What does remain "legally possible," however, is that one property owner could seek to enforce the restrictive covenant against other residents.
Because the University enabled this possibility when it issued the deeds, it now has a moral and ethical responsibility to address it. This would be a substantial undertaking, since anyone who has ever owned one of these properties (and their descendants) technically retains some rights under America's common law tradition. However, if Duke found the issue important enough to address with one legal filing, I cannot reconcile the University's decision to abandon this next, more important step.
Moreover, the second, more opprobrious requirement of Duke's covenants-which specifies that blacks cannot sleep on the property unless they are domestic workers-remains legally active within these homeowners' deeds. Unlike more generic requirements that houses not be sold to blacks (which were common across the South during the 1930s and 1940s), there appears to be no legal precedent for this Duke-specific prohibition, thus providing ample reason why the covenants should be stricken in their entirety.
How unfortunate, then, that the University's attention to this matter was so cursory that Bernard did not contact a single affected homeowner in the course of her research. Residents had to learn about this action and its impact on their property via local newspapers' summaries of a University press release. This is not only poor communication; it is also shoddy legal work.
Just as troubling (for me at least) has been this entire community's unwillingness to confront our racist past.
Hundreds of present and former faculty members live in these homes, and yet administrative cooperation has been extremely hard to come by: It took me three semesters of begging and pleading and clawing to get even this substandard response. An alumnus with whom I worked closely has been lobbying officials for nearly four decades.
Worse yet, I was shocked to discover that when given the opportunity to "rescind" these racist covenants in 1970, only two-thirds of faculty homeowners agreed to do so; the other one-third apparently preferred to keep the vile language. And in all my time spent researching this issue, only one current homeowner expressed any interest in the process.
That disturbs me, which is why I chose to revisit this issue in my second-to-last column.
Indeed, I think it important that Duke do the moral thing whenever possible, not because it's in our financial interest or to our legal advantage but because it is the right thing to do. I once thought that common purpose knitted our community together, transcending rank and discipline.
In a case as morally outrageous as this one, seeing our most senior administrators cast those principles aside grieves me deeply.
Kristin Butler is a Trinity senior. Her column runs every Tuesday.
Get The Chronicle straight to your inbox
Signup for our weekly newsletter. Cancel at any time.