Launched in 2021, Wake County Register of Deeds Office’s Enslaved Persons Project culled the names of enslaved people from thousands of pages from Wake County deed books. As soon as that gargantuan task was completed in 2023, the Register of Deeds undertook a new project — cataloguing and mapping Wake County’s historic racially restrictive covenants. Using Optical Character Recognition to scan more than a half-million documents, the Register of Deeds Office, its partners, and volunteers identified 15,000 deeds whose terms shaped Raleigh in ways that persist to this day.

We’ve seen racially restrictive covenants in Wilson, where they were activated in the subdivisions that unfolded along West Nash Street in the second quarter of the twentieth century. Wilson did not rely on deed restrictions as heavily as Raleigh, but the impact of historic residential segregation patterns continues to resonate.