EDMOND — City officials are still flushing racist housing restrictions out of decades-old neighborhood covenants, and now leaders of this once-notorious “sundown town” — one dangerous if not deadly for Black people — want another official, discriminatory limitation rooted out.
This one is in the 100-year-old Edmond city charter: a “freeholder” requirement to run for the offices of mayor and city council member. In other, more modern words, only property owners can serve. Renters need not apply.
Edmond is not alone. Oklahoma City has no such requirement in its amended charter. At least two Oklahoma City Council members live in rented apartments. But other suburbs do. In fact, the Oklahoma Constitution spells out how municipalities may form and amend their charters. It requires freeholders.
The issue came up in Edmond last year in the run-up to this year’s primary and general elections, with a candidate withdrawing from the race for a vacant seat on the Edmond City Council because he did not own property. It had come up before, apparently most recently in 2007. Nothing was done about it.
This time, this city council, with the correction of discriminatory city records already under way but no time to schedule a vote to change the charter, punted the issue until after Tuesday’s general election and the seating of the next city council. The new council will be sworn in May 5.
The present council passed a “resolution of support for dispensing with the freeholder requirement” to officially signal its desire to see it go to the next council. The mayor’s seat is the only one open. Both run-off candidates, Mark Nash and Tom Robins, have said they are in favor of changing the charter.
Property restrictions on voting in Edmond City Charter related historically to racist neighborhood covenants
The council has voted to change a few of the old neighborhood covenants at each meeting since Jan. 14, when it scrubbed documents for the Highland Park addition, platted in 1909. The plan is to change the last six of 19 racist neighborhood plats that exclude Black people at the April 28 meeting.
Racist neighborhood covenants and the property restriction in the city charter are related, if not explicit. In the 1920s, and for decades, Black people could not own property in most Edmond neighborhoods, so they could not run for public office.
The city actively promoted itself as all-white, according to the Edmond History Museum’s online section called “Was Edmond a Sundown Town?” The city charter aimed to keep it all white, apparently.
“That’s how Edmondites promoted the town,” the museum says. “Local business owners, students at Central State College (now University of Central Oklahoma), and even the Chamber of Commerce all advertised Edmond as 100% white, with no African American population from the early 1920s to the late 1940s.
“In addition to boasting that the town was 100% white, Edmond residents also made sure that no African Americans, or even most people of color, owned property in Edmond from the 1910s until the late 1940s, through racially restrictive covenants. A third barrier that succeeded in keeping African Americans out of Edmond was the establishment of a Ku Klux Klan chapter in Edmond in 1922. These three factors ensured that Edmond was an all-white town until the 1970s.”
Property restrictions on elections were common in the 1920s when Edmond City Charter was written, scholars say
Property restrictions on elections were common in the 1920s
The National League of Cities doesn’t track the historic use of property restrictions on elections, a spokesman said, but a study by Katherine Levine Einstein and Maxwell Palmer, political science professors at Boston University, found they were common at the time Edmond’s charter was written.
“Property requirements persisted well into the 20th century, with almost 90 percent of propertyrequirements restricting voting and officeholding at the local level,” the professors wrote in “Land of the Freeholder: How Property Rights Make Local Voting Rights,” published online by Yale University.
The research, published in 2021, suggests that “homeowner citizens were granted particular political control over local taxation and public services,” Einstein and Palmer wrote. “These requirements were largely clustered in the American South and West — emerging alongside Jim Crow laws and mass availability of federal public lands — and were not eliminated until the Supreme Court took action.”
Changing the city’s official founding document after 100 years won’t be as simple as a vote of the city council. It requires developing new legal language and calling an election to change Article II, Section 9 of the City Charter, which requires candidates for offices to be “freeholders.”
The restriction is unconstitutional, according to the Oklahoma attorney general’s office. Nonetheless, as first reported by nonprofit news organization Nondoc, Moore also has the property ownership requirement for officeholders.
Leslie Blair, spokesman for the Oklahoma Municipal League, said that organization had no information on such restrictions either way.
But a look at municipal codes of other OKC suburbs showed that Yukon’s includes ways to amend the city charter including the city council, by ordinance, calling for the election of a “board of freeholders to prepare and propose amendments.”
Bethany’s municipal code has a similar provision, as does Del City’s, as the state Constitution, technically, requires.
Oklahoma AG’s office: Property restriction in Edmond City Charter is ‘unconstitutional, unenforceable and invalid’
As first reported by nonprofit news organization Nondoc, state Rep. Erick Harris, R-Edmond, after learning of the freeholder requirement in Edmond’s charter, asked for an attorney general’s opinion on it. On Feb. 13, Deputy General Counsel Kyle Shifflett responded with a letter of counsel instead of a formal opinion, Nondoc reported, “because the United States Supreme Court has addressed this issue several times.”
“The court’s precedent is clear and consistent,” Shifflett wrote. “If challenged, a reviewing court would likely hold Edmond’s freeholder qualification provision to be unconstitutional, unenforceable and invalid. As a housekeeping matter, city leaders may wish to amend the city charter to omit the freeholder qualification in the next election. Such decision falls within their sound discretion.”
The Edmond City Council unanimously approved the resolution.
“All of us have been exploring what is the most efficient, best way to remove that … My stance has always been that it’s unconstitutional,” Ward 3 Councilmember Christin Mugg said. “I was glad that the mayor asked the city attorney to write this resolution as a public statement that we, as a body, unanimously support exploring this and getting it off, so there’s no question. I appreciate the efforts to do this publicly.”
Staff writer Richard Mize covers Oklahoma County government and the city of Edmond. He previously covered housing, commercial real estate and related topics for the newspaper and Oklahoman.com, starting in 1999. Contact him at rmize@oklahoman.com.