Shelley v. Kraemer

Appellant
J. D. Shelley
Appellee
Louis Kraemer
Appellant's Claim
That restrictive covenants in real estate contracts preventing occupancy by African Americans violates the Fourteenth Amendment guarantee of equal protection of the laws.
Chief Lawyers for Appellant
George L. Vaughn, Herman Willer
Chief Lawyer for Appellee
Gerald L. Seegers
Justices for the Court
Hugo Lafayette Black, Harold Burton, William O. Douglas, Felix Frankfurter, Frank Murphy, Fred Moore Vinson (writing for the Court)
Justices Dissenting
None (Robert H. Jackson, Stanley Forman Reed, Wiley Blount Rutledge did not participate)
Place
Washington, D.C.
Date of Decision
3 May 1948
Decision
The Supreme Court ruled that although such covenants can be created, they cannot be enforced by state or federal courts.
Significance
The impact of Shelley on the emerging civil rights struggle was enormous. After this decision, a powerful form of racial discrimination in housingwas no longer judicially enforceable.
In February of 1911, 29 of the 30 owners of property in a St. Louis, Missouri, neighborhood signed an agreement not to rent or sell their property to African Americans or Asian Americans. The 29 signatories held 47 of the 57 parcels of land involved. At the time of the signing, five of the parcels were owned by African Americans. One of these African American families had lived on their land since 1882.
In October of 1945, J. D. Shelley and his wife, who were African American, bought a parcel of land in the neighborhood from someone named Fitzgerald. TheShelleys apparently had no knowledge of the restrictive covenant attached tothe land. The following October, Louis Kraemer and his wife, who owned otherproperty that was covered by the restrictive covenant, went to the circuit court of the city of St. Louis in an effort to enforce the agreement and take the land deed away from the Shelleys. The trial court ruled against the Kraemers, declaring that the agreement was invalid because it had never been signedby all the affected parties. The Supreme Court of Missouri reversed this decision. The Shelleys then petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court for review of thecase.
Supreme Court Declares Racially Discriminatory Restrictive Covenants Unenforceable
Agreements that restrict land use are common and usually legal. The Shelleysargued, however, that a racially biased restrictive covenant violated their right to equal protection under law, guaranteed at the state level by the Fourteenth Amendment. Whereas most such covenants seek to restrict land use, thecovenant in question unconstitutionally sought to bar certain races of people.
Segregation in housing was at one time enforced by municipal zoning laws. After the Court declared such laws unconstitutional in Buchanan v. Warley(1917), property holders turned to private agreements as a means of enforcing housing segregation. At the time that Shelley was brought before thecourts, such agreements were being routinely enforced in the North and had begun spreading to the rest of the country.
In reaching its decision, the Court split some fine legal hairs. Writing forthe Court, Chief Justice Vinson declared that the St. Louis restrictive covenant was a private agreement, and therefore the Court had no power to prohibitit. What had been ruled out in Buchanan were restrictions imposed bythe state, and such "state action" was clearly unconstitutional. Judicial enforcement of private restrictive covenants was not state action, but when thecovenants were themselves unconstitutional, the courts were prohibited from putting them into effect:

These are not cases . . . in which the States have merely abstained from action, leaving private individuals free to impose such discrimination as they see fit. Rather, these are cases in which the States have made available to such individuals the full coercive power ofgovernment 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 enjoymentof those rights on an equal footing.

The Shelley Court paid scant attention to the sociological data supplied by the parties. It also paid little attention to the fact that there was evidence that the courts that had been enforcing discriminatory restrictive covenants had been themselves adopting segregationist policies. The whole argument of the Court's opinion rather disingenuously failed to note that at a certain point judicial enforcement of private agreements becomes indistinguishable from state action. Still, the impact of Shelley v. Kraemer was undeniable. Suddenly, discrimination in housing was a serious issue with constitutional implications. The decision both discouraged future discriminatory restrictive covenants and encouraged those engaged in the civil rights movement to expand their struggle.
Related Cases

• Buchanan v. Warley, 245 U.S. 60 (1917).
  
• Jones v. Mayer, 392 U.S. 409 (1968).

Chicago's Restrictive Real Estate Covenants
The term "restrictive real estate covenants" might seem dry, but the term signifies a highly dramatic aspect in the history of segregation. Wendy Plotkinstudied covenants designed to keep African Americans out of suburban Chicagoneighborhoods, and noted that a number of respected institutions, including local YMCAs and the University of Chicago, upheld the practice.
One of the first significant challenges to the covenants came from a local African American Republican leader, NAACP member, and real-estate developer Carl Hansberry, who in 1937 bought a home in all-white Washington Park. Hansberry's daughter Lorraine, two-years-old at the time, would later grow up and write Raisin in the Sun (1959), a memoir which recorded the challenges her family faced as it integrated Washington Park.
Raisin in the Sun, which became a film starring Sidney Poitier, was not the only important work inspired by the efforts to integrate Chicago's neighborhoods. Noted African American poet Langston Hughes wrote a poem entitled"Restrictive Covenants," and the subject of Chicago's restrictive covenants figured heavily in An American Dilemma by Gunnar Myrdal, a significantwork of sociology.
Sources
Plotkin, Wendy. "Racial Restrictive Covenants in U.S." www.iuc.edu.