| Shelley v. Kraemer | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Argued January 14, 1948 Decided May 3, 1948 | |
| Full case name | Shelley et ux. v. Kraemer et ux. McGhee et ux. v. Sipes et al. |
| Citations | 334U.S.1 (more) |
| Case history | |
| Prior | Judgment for defendants; reversed, 198S.W.2d 679 (Mo. 1947); certiorari granted. Judgment for plaintiffs; affirmed 25N.W.2d 638 (Mich. 614); certiorari granted. |
| Holding | |
| The Fourteenth Amendment prohibits a state from enforcing restrictive covenants that would prohibit a person from owning or occupying property based on race or color. | |
| Court membership | |
| |
| Case opinion | |
| Majority | Vinson, joined by Black, Frankfurter, Douglas, Murphy, Burton |
| Reed, Jackson and Rutledge took no part in the consideration or decision of the case. | |
| Laws applied | |
| U.S. Const. amend. XIV | |
This case overturned a previous ruling or rulings | |
| Corrigan v. Buckley (1926) | |
Shelley v. Kraemer, 334 U.S. 1 (1948), is alandmark[1]United States Supreme Court case that held that racially restrictive housingcovenants (deed restrictions) cannot legally be enforced.
The case arose after an African-American family purchased a house inSt. Louis that was subject to a restrictive covenant preventing "people of the Negro or Mongolian Race" from occupying the property. The purchase was challenged in court by a neighboring resident and was blocked by theSupreme Court of Missouri before going to the U.S. Supreme Court on appeal.
In an opinion joined in by all participating justices, U.S. Supreme Court Chief JusticeFred Vinson held that theFourteenth Amendment'sEqual Protection Clause prohibits racially restrictive housing covenants from being enforced. Vinson held that while private parties may abide by the terms of a racially restrictive covenant, judicial enforcement of the covenant by a court qualified as astate action and was thus prohibited by the Equal Protection Clause.
In 1945, an African-American family by the name of Shelley purchaseda house inSt. Louis,Missouri. At the time of purchase, they were unaware that arestrictive covenant had been in place on the property since 1911. The restrictive covenant prevented "people of theNegro orMongolian Race" from occupying the property. Louis Kraemer, who lived ten blocks away, sued to prevent the Shelleys from gaining possession of the property. TheSupreme Court of Missouri held that the covenant was enforceable against the purchasers because the covenant was a purely private agreement between its original parties. As such, it "ran with the land" and was enforceable against subsequent owners. Moreover, since it ran in favor of an estate rather than merely a person, it could be enforced against a third party. A similar scenario occurred in thecompanion caseMcGhee v. Sipes fromDetroit,Michigan, where the McGhees purchasedproperty that was subject to a similar restrictive covenant. In that case, theSupreme Court of Michigan also held the covenants enforceable.
The Supreme Court consolidatedShelley v. Kraemer andMcGhee v. Sipes cases for oral arguments and considered two questions:
George L. Vaughn was a black attorney who represented J. D. Shelley at the Supreme Court of the United States. The attorneys who argued the case for the McGhees wereThurgood Marshall andLoren Miller. TheUnited States Solicitor General,Philip Perlman, who argued in this case that the restrictive covenants were unconstitutional, had previously in 1925 as the city solicitor ofBaltimore acted to support the city government's segregation efforts.[2]
The U.S. Office of the Solicitor General filed, for the first time in a civil rights case, anamicus curiae ("friend of the court") brief in support of the Shelleys. The Solicitor General's brief filed on behalf of the United States government was written by four Jewish lawyers:Philip Elman,Oscar H. Davis,Hilbert P. Zarky, andStanley M. Silverberg. However, the Solicitor General's office chose to omit their names from the brief. Deputy Solicitor GeneralArnold Raum, who was also Jewish, stated that it was "bad enough that [Solicitor General Philip] Perlman's name has to be there, to have one Jew's name on it, but you have also put four more Jewish names on. That makes it look as if a bunch of Jewish lawyers in the Department of Justice put this out."[3]
On May 3, 1948, the Supreme Court issued a unanimous 6–0 decision in favor of the Shelleys. JusticesRobert H. Jackson,Stanley F. Reed, andWiley Blount Rutledge recused themselves from the case, likely because they each owned property that was subject to restrictive covenants.[4] The Supreme Court held "that the [racially] restrictive agreements, standing alone, cannot be regarded as violative of any rights guaranteed to petitioners by the Fourteenth Amendment."[5] Private parties might abide by the terms of such a restrictive covenant, but they might not seek judicial enforcement of such a covenant, as that would be astate action. Because such state action would be discriminatory, the enforcement of a racially based restrictive covenant in a state court would therefore violate theEqual Protection Clause of theFourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.
The court rejected the argument that since state courts would enforce a restrictive covenant against white people, judicial enforcement of restrictive covenants would not violate the Equal Protection Clause. The court noted that the Fourteenth Amendment guarantees individual rights, and that equal protection of the law is not achieved by the imposition of inequalities:
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.
Hurd v. Hodge andUrciolo v. Hodge, from theDistrict of Columbia,[6] likeMcGhee v. Sipes, from the State ofMichigan, was also a companion case, but had to be decided on different reasons. The Equal Protection Clause does not explicitly apply to a U.S. territory not in aU.S. state, but the Court found that both theCivil Rights Act of 1866 and treating persons in the District of Columbia like those in the states forbade restrictive covenants.
Similar to the response to theBrown decision, there were wide levels of resistance. In this case, the resistance came from federal agencies. TheFederal Housing Administration (FHA) commissionerFranklin D Richards announced two weeks later[7] that the decision would "in no way affect the programs of this agency" adding that it was not "the policy of the Government to require private individuals to give up their right to dispose of their property as they [see] fit, as a condition of receiving the benefits of the National Housing Act."[8]
Notably, the decision only banned state enforcement of said contracts, and did not prevent such contracts from existing.[9] Through the 1950s racially restrictive covenants continued to be added to deeds.[10] TheMayers v. Ridley decision in 1972[11] ruled that the covenants themselves violated theFair Housing Act and that county clerks should be prohibited from accepting deeds with such clauses.[12]
One year later, on December 2, 1949,US solicitor generalPhilip Perlman announced that the "FHA could no longer insure mortgages with restrictive covenants".[13] In 1962, theEqual Opportunity in Housing executive order was signed byPresident John F. Kennedy, prohibiting using federal funds to support racial discrimination in housing. This caused the FHA to "cease financing subdivision developments whose builders openly refused to sell to black buyers."[14] In 1968, Congress enacted the Fair Housing Act, which voided racially discriminatory covenants in housing and made them illegal.[15]
In 2010, Jeffrey S. Copeland publishedOlivia's Story: The Conspiracy of Heroes Behind Shelley v. Kraemer,[16] a literary nonfiction account of events leading up to theShelley v. Kraemer case. In 2017, a documentary film was made titledThe Story of Shelley v. Kraemer. The script for the film was written by Copeland, and it was produced by Joe Marchesani and Laney Kraus-Taddeo of the Audio/Video Production Services division of Educational Technology and Media Services at theUniversity of Northern Iowa (Cedar Falls, Iowa).[17] The film has been a featured part of the exhibit titled "#1 in Civil Rights: The African American Freedom Struggle in St. Louis",[18] at theMissouri History Museum in St. Louis. The film was also nominated for theSundance Film Festival.
Works related toShelley v. Kraemer at Wikisource