Trusting Deeds: Race and Redlining in 1930s Greensboro

Thomas Storrs, University of Virginia

This paper demonstrates the knowledge gained by semi-automatically and manually transcribing a group of 4000 mortgage loans from 1919 to 1940 made by Greensboro's largest home lender, Gate City Building & Loan. This data informs an analysis of shifts in lending patterns relative to the HOLC Security Map from 1937 for Greensboro. The percentage of loans to African Americans declines from about 12% in the 1920s to just more than 6% in the 1930s.The data also reveal evidence of new spatial lending patterns either transmitted by or, more likely, reflected in the HOLC map. This approach constitutes a novel method of searching for a start date of government-encouraged redlining. The paper will incorporate both the evidence produced and the methods of its production. Redlining stemming from New Deal federal interventions in home lending attracts significant scholarly attention yet no previous study incorporates these methods that allow one to gauge change over time in such a precise manner. This project used ABBY Finereader to OCR the indexes from the register of deeds of the Gate City loans and Able2Extract to put them in Excel. Next, Bulk Rename Utility was used to pull the specific mortgage documents needed from 350,000 contemporaneous digitized pages of the Guilford County Register of Deeds. Manual transcription constituted the bulk of the effort in two categories: 1) the data from each loan to Excel and 2) matching up the borrowers with annual city directories for race, occupation, and home address. The resulting data allow for much more granular analysis than Census data, especially when searching for intradecadal change. The data will be of use to projects beyond the current one and the methods will benefit future efforts from exposition and comment at this conference.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 58. Transcription and Data Capture