Supreme Court Strikes Covenants: Housing Racism Crumbles

The house at 4600 Labadie Avenue in St. Louis was modest, but the legal fight over who could live there reached the Supreme Court and dismantled one of the most effective tools of American residential segregation. On May 3, 1948, the Court ruled unanimously in Shelley v. Kraemer that racially restrictive housing covenants, while technically legal as private agreements, could not be enforced by state courts without violating the Fourteenth Amendment's equal protection clause. Restrictive covenants were contractual agreements written into property deeds that prohibited the sale of homes to members of specified racial or ethnic groups, most commonly Black Americans. By the 1940s, these covenants covered an estimated 80 percent of residential property in Chicago and similarly large portions of housing stock in St. Louis, Los Angeles, Detroit, and Washington, D.C. They were the legal backbone of residential segregation in cities where Jim Crow statutes did not exist. J.D. and Ethel Lee Shelley, a Black couple from Mississippi who had moved to St. Louis during the Great Migration, purchased the Labadie Avenue home in 1945 without knowledge of the covenant restricting ownership to "people of the Caucasian race." Louis Kraemer, a white neighbor, sued to void the sale. Missouri courts ruled in Kraemer's favor, ordering the Shelleys to vacate. Chief Justice Fred Vinson, writing for the Court, drew a careful distinction. Private parties retained the right to enter into discriminatory agreements voluntarily. But when a state court used its authority to enforce such an agreement and compel a property transfer, that constituted state action subject to the Fourteenth Amendment. The ruling did not outlaw the covenants themselves; it simply made them unenforceable. The decision weakened but did not destroy residential segregation. Realtors, banks, and the Federal Housing Administration continued to channel Black homebuyers away from white neighborhoods through steering, redlining, and discriminatory lending. Full legal prohibition of housing discrimination would not come until the Fair Housing Act of 1968, twenty years later.