TOWSON — The Stoneleigh neighborhood in Towson is known for its stone and Cape Cod-style homes, tree-lined streets and manicured lawns.
But this idyllic community carries a dark past.
Watch as we learn the history of the neighborhood
“When you see it in your own home deed attached with your own property, I think it does hit home in a different way.” says Neha Lall, Stoneleigh homeowner. “Because this isn't something that happened a long time ago in a land far away. This is something that affects the place that's most important to you.”
Lall’s family and Ryan Cox’s family live a few streets over from each other in Stoneleigh, a covenant community founded in 1922. Meaning, whoever buys property here has to abide by a number of covenants spelled out in their deeds.
Like no distilleries, no graveyards. And this one:
“None of the land included in said tract, nor any building erected thereon, shall be occupied by any negro or person of negro extraction."
Prohibiting people of certain races or ethnicities from homeownership in specific neighborhoods was a longstanding practice called redlining. Now, Lall and Cox are among neighbors working to get that language struck from the land records of all 572 homes in their community.
“You see the developments of a lot of these suburbs,” Cox says," and as these are blank slates, so as these suburbs are being developed, it's, ‘Here’s what we would like to see in the neighborhood and here's what we would like to prevent in the neighborhood.’”
Cox, a historian and former state archives researcher, and Lall, a law professor who represented families facing housing discrimination, are using their expertise to bring about awareness.
“It's a wonderful place to live,” Cox says, “and you gotta recognize everything that came with the community. Here we are, 100 years after those words were put into the covenant, and we still find that there's a homogenous kind of feel here to Stoneleigh.”
A committee of Stoneleigh residents have gone door to door to get the covenant struck from as many deeds as possible. To date, 73 percent of the homeowners have done it.
“This whole, all these folks, I got all these folks, pretty much all of Oxford,” Lall says, pointing to the homes on her block and the neighboring street. “There's sometimes a Hatherleigh happy hour and I brought the paperwork for everyone who hadn't signed. I was like, ‘Let's have cocktails and sign the paperwork.’”
While modifying the deeds won't remove the racist language, it will render the covenant powerless. And for these homeowners, that's a good start.
“The point is to look at it, and to acknowledge it, to understand it, to be willing to talk about it,” Lall says. “Then what comes next is up to us.”
A state law that will take effect on October 1 will make it even easier to modify the deeds. It will allow Baltimore County to modify the deeds without the homeowners filling out the paperwork, as long as the county publishes a legal notice notifying homeowners of the pending action. They are hoping that the county will finish the process that they started and strike it from the remaining deeds.
