Shelley v. Kraemer

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Shelley v. Kraemer, 334 US 1 (1948) is a landmark United States Supreme Court case holding that the State-Action Doctrine includes the enforcement of private contracts, the Equal Protection Clause prohibits racially-restrictive housing covenants, and that such covenants are unenforceable in court.

Video Shelley v. Kraemer

Facts

In 1945, an African-American family by the name of Shelley purchased a house in St. Louis, Missouri. At the time of purchase, they were unaware that a restrictive covenant had been in place on the property since 1911. The restrictive covenant prevented "people of the Negro or Mongolian Race" from occupying the property. Louis Kraemer, who lived ten blocks away, sued to prevent the Shelleys from gaining possession of the property. The Supreme 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 materially-similar scenario occurred in the companion case McGhee v. Sipes from Detroit, Michigan, where the McGhees purchased land that was subject to a similar restrictive covenant. The Supreme Court consolidated both cases for oral arguments and considered two questions:

• Are racially based restrictive covenants legal under the Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution?
• Can they be enforced by a court of law?

Maps Shelley v. Kraemer

Decision

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." Private parties may abide by the terms of such a restrictive covenant, but they may not seek judicial enforcement of such a covenant, as that would be a state action. Such state action would be discriminatory so the enforcement of a racially-based restrictive covenant in a state court would violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

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.

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Background

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 were Thurgood Marshall and Loren Miller. 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.

Hurd v. Hodge and Urciolo v. Hodge were companion cases from the District of Columbia. The Equal Protection Clause does not explicitly apply to a US territory not in a U.S. state, but the Court found that both the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and treating persons in the District of Columbia like those in the states forbade restrictive covenants.

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Solicitor General's brief

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, and Stanley M. Silverberg. However, the Solicitor General's office chose to omit their names from the brief. Deputy Solicitor General Arnold 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."

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Literary Responses

In 2010, Jeffrey S. Copeland published Olivia's Story: The Conspiracy of Heroes Behind Shelley v. Kraemer, a literary nonfiction account of events leading up to the Shelley v. Kraemer case. In 2017, a documentary film was made titled "The 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 the University of Northern Iowa (Cedar Falls, Iowa). The film has been a featured part of the exhibit titled "#1 in Civil Rights: The African American Freedom Struggle in St. Louis," at the Missouri History Museum in St. Louis, Missouri. The film was also nominated for the Sundance Film Festival.

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See also

• List of United States Supreme Court cases, volume 334
• Shelley House (St. Louis, Missouri), National Historic Landmark
• Noble v. Alley, a similar case decided by the Supreme Court of Canada in 1951.
• US labor law

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References

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Sources

• Darden, Joe T. (1995). "Black Residential Segregation Since the 1948 Shelley v. Kraemer Decision". Journal of Black Studies. 25 (6): 680-691. doi:10.1177/002193479502500603. 
• Gilmore, Brian (March 11, 2009). "Not in My Backyard". The Root. 
• Henkin, Louis (1962). "Shelley v. Kraemer: Notes for a Revised Opinion". University of Pennsylvania Law Review. 110 (4): 473-505. doi:10.2307/3310675. JSTOR 3310675. 
• Higginbotham, A. Leon (1989). "Race, sex, education and Missouri jurisprudence: Shelley v. Kraemer in a historical perspective". Washington University Law Quarterly. 67: 673-708. ISSN 0043-0862. 

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External links

Works related to Shelley v. Kraemer at Wikisource

• "Orsel McGhee House," A Michigan State Historic Site. Detroit: The History and Future of the Motor City Website Accessed 26 March 2014

Source of article : Wikipedia