It was 1961 or 1962, and my dad was a young teen working in a drugstore in downtown Mount Vernon. He met two young women, both Black and from Seattle, who visited Mount Vernon for a day to explore Skagit Valley College and to look for a place to live so they could go to school. He said the women left discouraged after being turned down, time and time again, when they tried to find a place to rent.
My dad’s memory was that no one, anywhere in town, would rent to them.
As a family, we’ve always chalked it up to racist attitudes, but a recent study adds some important context that makes it an appropriate reflection on this Martin Luther King Jr. Day.
The study is called the The Racial Restrictive Covenants Project, and it is a collaboration between the University of Washington and Eastern Washington University to uncover racist deed provisions that once barred people who were not white from buying, renting or occupying homes. In 2021, the state legislature passed House Bill 1335 directing the project to identify these neighborhoods statewide. Researchers have since examined more than seven million property records and identified documents affecting over 80,000 properties with the help of nearly 1,900 volunteers.
The researchers found more than 500 properties across 26 subdivisions in Skagit County where racially restrictive covenants were imposed, primarily between 1930 and 1954. Many explicitly limited ownership or occupancy to white or “Caucasian” residents, sometimes allowing people of color to live on-site only as domestic servants. Large clusters appear on Fidalgo Island and around Similk Bay, with others in Mount Vernon and Lake Cavanaugh.
The Skagit Valley College hopefuls my dad met in his youth weren’t just facing racist attitudes. They were facing racism scripted into housing agreements that were legally enforceable.
The study piqued my interest and made me wonder, did La Conner have racist housing covenants? I didn’t see any La Conner neighborhoods in the study, so I reached out to the researchers themselves to find out.
Researchers did not uncover racist housing covenants in La Conner itself. However, that absence should be understood carefully. As the Racial Restrictive Covenants Project lead researcher James Gregory explained, historical data for Skagit County is limited: Federal surveys did not reliably report homeownership data for the county until 2022, and even then only for larger demographic groups. With very small numbers of Black and Asian residents historically, available samples are simply too thin to draw definitive conclusions.
The study did identify La Conner as a suspected sundown town in 1970. The designation is based on census data showing that La Conner had zero Black households that year. Out of a total population of 639, the census recorded 16 Asian residents and 12 Indigenous residents, but no Black families living in town.
That absence alone does not prove intent. But in the context of Skagit County’s housing history, it raises important questions about how, and if, the extensive record of formal exclusion nearby served as a barrier to integration here.
Dr. King warned that injustice persists when communities choose comfort over truth. This history does not ask today’s residents to accept blame for the past. It asks us to recognize how exclusion shaped this place and to consider how its legacy may still influence who feels welcome today.
MLK Jr. Day reminds us that the work of justice begins with honesty.
In La Conner and across Skagit County, that work starts by facing the history we inherited, even when it arrives quietly through census tables and buried deeds.
Learn more about racist restrictive covenants in Skagit County, including sample deed language and interactive maps, here: https://depts.washington.edu/covenants/county_skagit.shtml
Kari Mar is the editor and publisher of La Conner Community News.
