They were everywhere in the first half of the 20th century, explicitly written in property deeds: "No blacks may live here." Today, if you own a home across the Western New York suburbs and even in certain neighborhoods in Buffalo itself, you may still find “racial covenants” in your deed, with language like this: “The premises described herein are not to be occupied by any person or persons other than those of the Caucasian or White race.”
Or this: “Said lots or buildings thereon shall never be rented, leased or sold, transferred or conveyed to, nor shall the same be exclusively occupied by, any negro or colored person or person of negro blood.”
Such deeds were commonplace across the U.S., and locally in Cheektowaga, Orchard Park, Snyder, the Town of Tonawanda, West Seneca, East Aurora, Buffalo’s Central Park neighborhood and elsewhere. The federal Fair Housing Act of 1968 made all such racial stipulations illegal, null and void (though it was not until 1972 that all loopholes were definitively closed). Yet the legacy of institutionalized racial discrimination in housing lives on today in Western New York, still one of the most racially segregated regions in the country.
Lincoln Park Village in the Town of Tonawanda was just one development that explicitly excluded all non-whites. Built from 1946 thru ’48 along a one-mile stretch of Niagara Falls Boulevard by Pearce & Pearce, builders of thousands of WNY homes in the post-WWII era, each Lincoln Park house carried a deed containing this stipulation:
“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…”
Black people who looked into buying one of the 400 houses in Lincoln Park or similar developments were quietly steered away by real estate agents. In extremely rare cases, a black couple did manage to buy and move into a development. If they were welcomed by their neighbors rather than driven out, they could look forward to being the only family of color in the neighborhood for decades to come.
The consequence of this, in a region where few new people from outside WNY move in and homeowners tend to stay in the same neighborhood for most of their lives?
According to the 2020 census, Orchard Park was 98% white and 0.5% black; Hamburg, 98% white, 0.5% black; West Seneca, 98% white, 1% black; East Aurora, 95% white, 1% black; the Town of Tonawanda, 93% white, 1% black; Cheektowaga, 95% white, 3% black; Snyder/Eggertsville, 89% white, 3% black; and Amherst as a whole, 84% white, 6% black.
The conventional wisdom says that such segregation occurs naturally, that the races tend to cluster together. But when black workers from the South and their families started arriving in Buffalo during World War II, they tended to live alongside white immigrants on the East Side -- often within the same boarding houses.
But “mass homeownership after World War II changed that,” as Charlie Specht of the Buffalo News wrote in 2024. Federal homebuilding programs incentivizing suburban development were designed -- through racial covenants and other mechanisms -- to prevent black people from “realizing the American Dream in the same ways as their white neighbors.”
The white flight to the suburbs was on.
Today grassroots movements to find and permanently strike racial covenants from property deeds are springing up. One such effort succeeded in removing racial restrictions from the deeds of 300 homes in Brighton, a Rochester suburb. Another is underway in Buffalo, spearheaded by the nonprofit group Housing Opportunities Made Equal (HOME) and the UB School of Law’s Civil Rights and Transparency Clinic.
It has been more than 50 years since racial covenants were voided and made illegal, yet there they are, buried deep in old property deeds. And their insidious legacy still leaves its mark on the Niagara Frontier.
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Cast (in order of appearance):
Mr. Daniels: Alfonzo Tyson
Mrs. Daniels: Verneice Turner
Real estate agent: Craig Kunaschk
Narrator: Susan Banks
Sound recording: Aaron Heverin
Sound editing: Micheal Peters
Piano theme: Excerpt from “Buffalo City Guards Parade March,” by Francis Johnson (1839)
Performed by Aaron Dai
Produced by the Niagara Frontier Heritage Project
Written by Jeff Z. Klein
Associate producer: Karl-Eric Reif
Special thanks to:
Kathryn Larsen, vice president, content distribution, Buffalo Toronto Public Media
S.J. Velasquez, director of audio strategy, Buffalo Toronto Public Media
Jerry Urban, senior radio broadcast engineer
UB Law students Khalia Muir and Chris Flynn, fair housing researcher James Coughlin and associate law professor Heather Abraham, director of the Civil Rights & Transparency Clinic.
Council Member Mitchell P. Nowakowski and the City of Buffalo for their generous support.
Written by Jeff Z. Klein (Niagara Frontier Heritage Project)