Municipalities in Oklahoma will soon be able to remove illegal, discriminatory covenants within their charters.
Senate Bill 1617 was signed into law by Gov. Kevin Stitt last week. The new act allows municipalities to update and remove illegal discriminatory covenants from existing plats and deems them unlawful, unenforceable and invalid.
These covenants were placed in property records to prevent people who were not white from buying or occupying land. Although the agreements were largely used to bar Black people from moving into certain neighborhoods, they targeted different racial, ethnic groups and religious groups, too.
The U.S. Supreme Court decided these covenants were unenforceable in 1948 and they became illegal 20 years later with the passing of the Fair Housing Act. But the racist and discriminatory language remains on the books across the country.
Sen. Kristen Thompson, R-Edmond, and Rep. John Pfeiffer, R-Orlando, authored the legislation.
“I mean, no county records are destroyed or anything like that. It’s just a way to update some very outdated, lot of cases, very racist language that isn't enforceable anyways,” Pfeiffer said.
This comes after a law passed last year made discriminatory real estate covenants ‘null and void’ and created a path for individuals to amend their land records.
Pfeiffer authored that bill after reading a NonDoc article revealing how a business owner found racially restrictive covenant language in Edmond. Pfeiffer said the article made him mad because the language is still on property records and cleaning up the language shows the state is moving forward.
In addition to signing on as a co-author of SB1617, Sen. George Young, D-Oklahoma City, was a co-author of Pfeiffer's measure from this past session.
Young represents the largest African American constituency in Oklahoma and said he wanted his name on the bill to represent his community. He said the Oklahoma Realtors Association first approached him to support the bill.
“And I said ‘Of course,’ because we need to get rid of those kinds of things that are remnants of a day past and gone,” Young said. “We're not trying to forget that day, but we're also trying to correct the wrongs that have been done in that day. And one of the things we could do is to take out those types of discriminatory covenants that exist.”
The new law requires the city or town to notify property owners 30 days before any changes. The notice must give information on the location, time and date of the planning commission meeting where the update to the record will be considered.
The measure takes effect in November.
