2025 WA GIS Conference

A GIS Strategy to Map Historic Racial Covenants Across Washington State
Stacy Warren, Logan Camporeale, Larry Cebula, Tara Kelly, Monique Baxter, Rachael Lowe

The Washington State Racial Covenants Project, in response to Washington House Bill 1335, seeks to identify all properties with recorded covenants or deed restrictions that include racially discriminatory language. Ultimately, all property owners and prospective buyers should have an easily accessible tool to check whether a given property has ever had a racial covenant associated with it. A team of student and faculty researchers at Eastern Washington University has been tasked with tracking down, mapping, and sharing these documents with the public across fourteen counties in Eastern Washington. We report on the critical role GIS has played in achieving these goals. Specifically, we use a combination of ArcGIS Pro for geodatabase development and Experience Builder for presenting our results in interactive map form.
Our interdisciplinary team includes historians, geographers, anthropologists, geoscientists and GIS practitioners. Much work has to be accomplished before GIS ever enters the picture; this project would not be possible without the hours our historians spent in dusty archives and our partners at University of Washington scanning and converting images to text. Properties with racial covenants can then be identified and entered into spreadsheets. We next developed a workflow to geolocate information from the spreadsheets into feature class layers, align with existing GIS layers from a variety of sources, and populate with attributes pulled from associated historic documents. This data forms the basis of our Experience Builder map series, starting with a prototype model for Spokane County that we are now applying to other counties in Eastern Washington. We report on our workflow design and logistics, problems encountered, and solutions discovered.