Bissett Schwanke is a Baltimore County real estate agent who participates in dozens of property settlements every year. Typically, the seller and buyer sit at a table and rapidly sift through piles of documents to sign.

Every now and then the tedium is jolted by a crude reminder of the nation’s racist history. The deed to an older home is presented to the buyers with a clause saying it can’t be sold to a “negro” or someone “of negro extraction.”

Such covenants were routinely assigned to homes in the United States from the 1920s to the 1950s. This was done with the encouragement of the federal government and is partly responsible for persistent housing segregation today.

The U.S. Supreme Court rendered racially restrictive covenants unenforceable in 1948, and a landmark housing law passed in 1968 made them illegal. But the intentional durability of property law means the language — which sometimes targets Black, Jewish and Asian people, or “Mongoloids” — remains part of the record into perpetuity.

Often the covenants specify that, while African Americans can’t own or rent the house, they could live there as a servant for the homeowner.

“It’s disgusting that it’s all still there,” said Schwanke, an agent with Cummings & Co.

Schwanke and some of her former neighbors in Baltimore County’s upscale Stoneleigh neighborhood are trying to remove this language from the books — at least where they live. She is among a group of volunteers working for the past two years to amend the deeds of all 527 Stoneleigh homes.

They’ve combed through online records, handed out information at the neighborhood pool and gone door to door to rally support. They’ve even offered prizes to residents in blocks where all homeowners sign the paperwork repudiating the old restrictions.

The Stoneleighite newsletter has charted their progress like a United Way drive. They’re up to 73% of homes and are banking on a late push — and a new law signed May 13 by Gov. Wes Moore — to close the gap.

Their work follows a pioneering effort made six years ago in Rodgers Forge, which sits west of York Road, across from Stoneleigh. Rodgers Forge volunteers modified 100% of their deeds in a few months. But a difference in how Stoneleigh and other Maryland subdivisions were developed makes the work harder.

Stripping away such covenants — a process called “discharging” — has been gaining momentum across the country, said Kirsten Delegard, co-founder and project director of Mapping Prejudice at the University of Minnesota Libraries, whose research helped start the movement.

Older homes just about anywhere in the country almost certainly have such language in their deeds, often without the knowledge of the homeowner. Sometimes only a recent deed, which obligates buyers to abide by unspecified earlier covenants, is presented at closing.

“There’s no place where you can go where you won’t find them,” Delegard said.

So far 22 states have passed laws making it easier to discharge, including Maryland in 2018 at the urging of Rodgers Forge volunteers. The change, championed by Stephen Lafferty, then a state delegate and now county planning director, streamlined the process and waived recording fees.

The law has been updated several times. In 2020, at the urging of Gaywood, a community beside Rodgers Forge, Del. Cathi Forbes submitted legislation to make the law, which had a sunset, permanent. It passed unanimously.

“A lot of people find out when they get their deed that the language was there and it was shocking,” Forbes said. “I was shocked.”

The law was amended again in 2023 to permit nonprofit associations — such as community associations — to file paperwork on behalf of homeowners. But the county or city must notify homeowners by mail with the option to reject the modification.

Under the latest legislation, which takes effect Oct. 1, a county or city can amend the deed after running a legal notice in a newspaper to give homeowners a chance to opt out.

That makes the process cheaper and easier, said Jim Douglas, archives manager for Historic Takoma Inc. He and other volunteers have been at it for several years, piggybacking on a project by Montgomery County to identify and map homes with the racist covenants.

They too have struggled to convince residents to undertake the cumbersome process. They plan to take advantage of this year’s changed law, which they helped write. Volunteers still will have to research each deed and fill out the forms. There was little opposition to the latest legislation, said Sen. Shaneka Henson, the main sponsor.

“I can imagine it is incredibly hurtful to go to settlement and see this unlawful language,” said Henson, the first Black woman to represent Anne Arundel County in the state Senate. “It would make you feel unwelcome.”

That was precisely the idea. Racist language in deeds has been around since at least 1850, but the idea really spread in the early 20th century, Delegard said.

A predecessor of the National Association of Realtors codified discrimination in its Code of Ethics in 1924, saying a real estate agent shouldn’t introduce “a character of property or occupancy, members of any race or nationality, or any individuals whose presence will clearly be detrimental to property values.”

Later, it wrote model covenants that were the basis for what many neighborhoods adopted. Tori Syrek, a spokesperson for the realtors association, declined to comment. But Delegard said the group has since owned up to its role. Some state branches have even issued apologies.

The covenants spread like wildfire as suburbs grew, and the federal government fanned the flames. The Federal Housing Administration instructed developers to use racial covenants if they wanted federal financing.

“They wrote racist covenants into the underwriting,” Delegard said.

Civil rights leaders protested at the time but to little avail. Violators of a covenant risked losing their homes to the originator of the deed — even years after the fact.

Then a Black couple in St. Louis, J.D. and Ethel Lee Shelley, challenged the practice in court. They had purchased a home using a white intermediary to get around a whites-only covenant. But a neighbor caught on and sued.

The case made it to the U.S. Supreme Court. In a unanimous opinion, the justices ruled in 1948 that racially restrictive covenants weren’t unconstitutional. But, the justices wrote, it would violate the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment for a state to enforce them. That rendered the clauses toothless.

The Shelleys went on to raise six children in the house, which is listed as a National Historic Landmark.

In 1968, Congress went further with the Fair Housing Act and explicitly outlawed restrictive covenants based on race, ethnicity or national origin, but they remain on the books for many older homes.

In Stoneleigh, the idea of nullifying the racist boilerplate emerged as the neighborhood prepared for its centennial in 2022. The nation was reckoning with race in the wake of George Floyd’s killing by a Minneapolis police officer two years earlier.

After looking at what Rodgers Forge accomplished, Stoneleigh residents learned their process would be much harder.

Banks of townhomes in Rodgers Forge were built on separate tracts of land, each with its own covenants to control joint matters such as shared roofs. The original builder had ceded authority over the covenants to the community association, so its president had the power to sign the modification paperwork.

“We didn’t need individual sign-offs,” said Dora Jacobs, an attorney living in Rodgers Forge who helped lead the effort there.

Similarly, neighborhoods where homeowners associations have the power to set and enforce covenants can change them with a vote of their boards. Homeland and the Orchards, in North Baltimore, did it that way.

But Stoneleigh, where every home has its own deed and covenants, had to do it one house at a time.

“It’s a pretty cumbersome process,” said Neha Lall, a Stoneleigh resident and a leader of the drive to modify deeds.

Volunteers dug into the state’s online property registry for the deeds to all the homes, scrolling through every change in ownership until reaching the original, often handwritten, documents.

Then the volunteers printed them, drew a line through the offensive language and filled out a form declaring that “the language of the unlawfully restrictive covenant is stricken in the document.” They took these to homeowners and asked them to sign. Completed forms were delivered in batches to the Baltimore County courthouse to be recorded. The result is technically an amendment. The original covenant remains on the books but is declared void.

Getting every house on board was hard and the group was prepared to end the effort, but the latest change to the law has restored hope.

A University of Baltimore law professor, Lall is of South Asian Indian descent and said she hasn’t faced overt discrimination in Stoneleigh. She calls the reaction to the deed modifications “overall supportive.”

Another person of color didn’t want the racist history to be erased from the record, Lall said.

“When I explained that the existence of the language would not be erased but rather stricken as an express rejection of that sentiment, they readily signed on,” Lall said.

Lall said it took a lot of time to educate people unfamiliar with real estate law and their community’s uncomfortable history.

“There were a handful of people who worried that it would make it hard to sell their property,” she said.

Others found the effort “performative” or an effort to cancel history. She hopes everyone can be convinced.

“Part of enjoying your privilege is knowing where it came from — you receive the benefit," she said.