The Origins and Diffusion of Racial Restrictive Covenants
Racial restrictive covenants-private agreements barring nonCaucasians from occupying or owning property-were a key element of the segregationist policies in the early twentieth-century United States. Yet though we know a great deal about racial restrictive covenants at the moment of their demise in the 1940s,' we know relatively little about their origins or spread. The practice disseminated rapidly among the states, yet the mechanisms of its diffusion are unclear. Why did restrictive covenants nationalize rapidly in the early 1920s? Why were they successfully implemented while other alternatives in race relations failed to materialize? What were the avenues for their diffusion? Much of the existing literature on policy diffusion,2 stemming from Jack 1