Anne Bonds:
We can certainly understand that these created and informed a pattern of racial segregation that has been persistent and has endured over decades and decades. While racial covenants themselves are illegal and they have been unenforceable for 70 years, and you couldn't even include racial language for 50 years, nonetheless, they really tell us about the kinds of processes, as an example of one of the mechanisms that was being used to deny access to housing. So, I think how things would look — well, we know that most families, regardless of their race and ethnicity, are looking for similar things, you know, safe neighborhoods, affordable, decent housing, places where there might be open space, or safe places for kids to play, good schools. And what we know is that racial covenants prevented access to the best and most well-resourced neighborhoods where those kinds of amenities existed. So, we can think about both in terms of the kind of boundaries they created — the sharp lines of race — but also we can think about how they denied access to those opportunities for a whole range of people. And so I think that when folks were moving to Milwaukee from the South during the Great Migration with hopes and dreams for a different life, moving into some of these other areas in the city would've been very appealing. I would have to think that our racial landscape would look different if people didn't encounter these various forms of discrimination that prevented access, because, of course, there were folks that had worked hard and had factory jobs and that were looking to live in the same neighborhoods where their white counterparts were.