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Shelley v. Kraemer
Supreme Court of the United States
Argued January 15, 1948 Decided May 3, 1948
Full case name	Shelley et ux. v. Kraemer et ux. McGhee et ux. v. Sipes et al.
Citations	334 U.S. 1 (more) 68 S. Ct. 836; 92 L. Ed. 1161; 3 A.L.R.2d 441
Prior history	Judgment for defendants; reversed, 198 S.W.2d 679 (Mo. 1947); certiorari granted. Judgement for plaintiffs; affirmed 25 N.W.2d 638 (Mich. 614); certiorari granted.
Holding
The Fourteenth Amendment prohibits a state from enforcing restrictive covenants which would prohibit a person from owning or occupying property on the basis of race or color.
Court membership
Chief Justice Fred M. Vinson Associate Justices Hugo Black · Stanley F. Reed Felix Frankfurter · William O. Douglas Frank Murphy · Robert H. Jackson Wiley B. Rutledge · Harold H. Burton
Case opinions
Majority	Vinson, joined by Black, Frankfurter, Douglas, Murphy, Burton
Reed, Jackson, Rutledge took no part in the consideration or decision of the case.
Laws applied
U.S. Const. amend. XIV

Shelley v. Kraemer, 334 U.S. 1 (1948), is a United States Supreme Court case which held that courts could not enforce racial covenants on real estate.

Facts of the case

In 1945, a black 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 barred "people of the Negro or Mongolian Race" from owning the property. Louis Kraemer, who lived ten blocks away from the purchased house, sued to restrain the Shelleys from taking possession of the property they had purchased. The Supreme Court of Missouri held that the covenant was enforceable against the purchasers because the covenant was a purely private agreement between the original parties thereto, which "ran with the land" and was enforceable against subsequent owners. A materially similar scenario took place in the companion case McGhee v. Sipes from Detroit, Michigan, where the McGhees purchased land subject to a similar restrictive covenant. The Supreme Court consolidated the two cases for oral arguments.

Legal questions

The Court considered two questions. First, are racially-based restrictive covenants legal under the Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution? Secondly, can they be enforced by a court of law?

Decision of the court

The United States Supreme Court held that racially-based restrictive covenants are, on their face, not invalid under the Fourteenth Amendment. Private parties may voluntarily abide by the terms of a restrictive covenant, but they may not seek judicial enforcement of such a covenant, because enforcement by the courts would constitute state action. Since such state action would necessarily be discriminatory, 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 an argument that since state courts would enforce a restrictive covenant against white persons, judicial enforcement of restrictive covenants would not be a violation of the Equal Protection Clause. The court noted that the Fourteenth Amendment guaranteed individual rights, and that equal protection of the law is not achieved with the imposition of inequalities.

The attorneys who argued the case for the McGhees were Thurgood Marshall and Loren Miller. The United States Solicitor General Philip Perlman, who had 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.^[1]

The Solicitor General's Brief

There is an interesting story regarding the brief filed on behalf of the United States government. It was written by four Jewish lawyers: Philip Elman, Oscar Davis, Hilbert Zarky, and Stanley Silverberg. However, the Solicitor General’s office chose to omit their names from the brief. The principal assistant to the Solicitor General, Arnold Raum, who was also Jewish, stated that it was “bad enough that 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.” ^[2]

References

See also

• List of United States Supreme Court cases, volume 334
• Shelley House (St. Louis, Missouri), National Historic Landmark

Further reading

• 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. 
• Henkin, Louis (1962). "Shelley v. Kraemer: Notes for a Revised Opinion". University of Pennsylvania Law Review 110 (4): 473–505. doi:10.2307/3310675. 
• 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 00430862. 

Brian Gilmore, Esq., "Not In My Backyard", TheRoot.com- http://www.theroot.com/views/not-my-backyard

External links

• Works related to Shelley v. Kraemer at Wikisource
• Full text of the decision courtesy of Findlaw.com

From Wikisource

Court Documents
Opinion of the Court
Wikipedia article

Private agreements to exclude persons of designated race or color from the use or occupancy of real estate for residential purposes do not violate the Fourteenth Amendment; but it is violative of the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment for state courts to enforce them. Corrigan v. Buckley, 271 U.S. 323, distinguished. Pp. 8-23.

(a) Such private agreements, standing alone, do not violate any rights guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment. Pp. 12-13.

(b) The actions of state courts and judicial officers in their official capacities are actions of the states within the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment. Pp. 14-18.

(c) In granting judicial enforcement of such private agreements in these cases, the states acted to deny petitioners the equal protection of the laws, contrary to the Fourteenth Amendment. Pp. 18-23.

(d) The fact that state courts stand ready to enforce restrictive covenants excluding white persons from the ownership or occupancy of property covered by them does not prevent the enforcement of covenants excluding colored persons from constituting a denial of equal protection of the laws, since the rights created by § 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment are guaranteed to the individual. Pp. 21-22. [p2]

(e) Denial of access to the courts to enforce such restrictive covenants does not deny equal protection of the laws to the parties to such agreements. P. 22.

No. 72. The Supreme Court of Missouri reversed a judgment of a state trial court denying enforcement of a private agreement restricting the use or occupancy of certain real estate to persons of the Caucasian race. 355 Mo. 814,198 S.W.2d 679. This Court granted certiorari. 331 U.S. 803. Reversed, p. 23.

No. 87. The Supreme Court of Michigan affirmed a judgment of a state trial court enjoining violation of a private agreement restricting the use or occupancy of certain real estate to persons of the Caucasian race. 316 Mich. 614, 25 N.W.2d 638. This Court granted certiorari. 331 U.S. 804. Reversed, p. 23. [p4]