Dirty Deeds & Discriminatory Housing in Boone County

Presentation and Discussion With CoMo Preservation

Librarian Rachel Brekhus will introduce a local project collecting documentary evidence of racially restrictive covenants and a racial-segregationist legal structure in Boone County introduced by developers, encouraged by professional norms, supported by local institutions and enforced formally and informally in the first half of the twentieth century. Co-sponsored by CoMo Preservation. Adults.

Librarian Rachel Brekhus will introduce a local project in progress collecting documentary evidence of racially restrictive covenants and a racial-segregationist legal structure in Boone County introduced by developers, encouraged by professional norms, supported by local institutions and enforced by formal and informal means throughout the first half of the twentieth century. Audience members are encouraged to reflect on their own interactions with real estate, as children growing up in a neighborhood, as tenants or home buyers, or as professionals engaged in the work of connecting people with homes.

Co-sponsored by CoMo Preservation.

About the presenter: Rachel Brekhus is a librarian who has worked at Marymount Manhattan College and the Leo Baeck Institute for German-Jewish History in New York City and at Elmer Ellis Library at the University of Missouri. Her opinions do not represent any of her employers, past or present, including the University of Missouri. She is neither a historian nor a sociologist, but she has been a librarian for both history and sociology, along with several other humanities and social science subjects, over her years in the profession. Soon after moving to Columbia in 1999, she joined the League of Women Voters in order to learn more about local civic and political life. When Mizzou Libraries commemorated the 150th anniversary of the Civil War, she created and led a Civil War bus tour of Columbia with financial support from the Missouri Humanities Council, based on her conversations with MU historians, online lurking in local history forums, attendance at state and county historical society presentations and reading of primary and secondary sources on local history from that era.

For the past ten years, she has become interested in the history of housing-related decision structures in Columbia and Boone County, where she has now lived longer than she has lived anywhere else. Historically, how were people's housing choices pressured, constrained, steered or encouraged? What impact do housing decisions by governments, developers, banks, real estate professionals and landlords have on homebuyers and tenants and with what consequences for families and communities? How do everyday life decisions, and the forces impinging upon them, become the stuff of history?

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