Racist Covenants

 

On this day in 1948 – The U.S. Supreme Court rules in Shelley v. Kraemer that covenants prohibiting the sale of real estate to blacks and other minorities are legally unenforceable.

In 1945, an African-American family by the name of Shelley purchased a house in St. Louis, Missouri. They were unaware that a restrictive covenant prevented "people of the Negro or Mongolian Race" from occupying the property

The ruling held that the Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protection Clause prohibits racially restrictive housing covenants from being enforced.

An interesting side note is that The United States Solicitor General, Philip Perlman, who argued in this case that the restrictive covenants were unconstitutional, had previously in 1925 as the city solicitor of Baltimore acted to support the city government's segregation efforts.

A unanimous decision by the Supreme Court included this opinion:

"We have no doubt that there has been state action in these cases in the full and complete sense of the phrase. The undisputed facts disclose that petitioners were willing purchasers of properties upon which they desired to establish homes. The owners of the properties were willing sellers, and contracts of sale were accordingly consummated. It is clear that, but for the active intervention of the state courts, supported by the full panoply of state power, petitioners would have been free to occupy the properties in question without restraint. These are not cases, as has been suggested, in which the States have merely abstained from action, leaving private individuals free to impose such discriminations as they see fit. Rather, these are cases in which the States have made available to such individuals the full coercive power of government to deny to petitioners, on the grounds of race or color, the enjoyment of property rights in premises which petitioners are willing and financially able to acquire and which the grantors are willing to sell. The difference between judicial enforcement and nonenforcement of the restrictive covenants is the difference to petitioners between being denied rights of property available to other members of the community and being accorded full enjoyment of those rights on an equal footing."

The Court held that standing alone, racially restrictive covenants do not violate the Fourteenth Amendment. Private parties may abide by the terms of such a covenant, but they may not seek judicial enforcement of such a covenant, as that would be a state action. Thus, the enforcements of the racially restrictive covenants in state court violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. - https://www.oyez.org/cases/1940-1955/334us1

https://digitalcommons.law.scu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1787&context=lawreview

https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/104545/shelley-v-kraemer/