# Shelley v. Kraemer *Shelley v. Kraemer*, 334 U.S. 1, decided **May 3, 1948**, held that state courts may not enforce **racially restrictive covenants**, the clauses in property deeds that barred owners from selling or renting to Black people (and often Asian Americans, Jews and others). The vote was **6 to 0**; three justices did not take part. Chief Justice Fred Vinson wrote the opinion. ## Why it matters By the 1940s restrictive covenants covered large parts of many American cities and suburbs, and federal mortgage underwriters encouraged them (see [[Redlining and Housing Discrimination]]). *Shelley* took away their legal force. It did not make them disappear: the covenants stayed in deeds, real estate agents and neighbors kept honoring them, and they kept shaping who lived where for decades. The gap between "unenforceable" and "gone" is one reason Congress still needed the [[Fair Housing Act of 1968]] twenty years later. The case also produced one of the most important ideas in civil rights law, the line between private choices and government action. ## The case In 1911, owners in a St. Louis neighborhood signed an agreement barring sale to "people of the Negro or Mongolian Race." In 1945 J. D. and Ethel Lee Shelley, a Black family, bought a house there. A neighbor, Louis Kraemer, sued to stop them taking possession, and the Missouri Supreme Court enforced the covenant. A similar case from Detroit, *McGhee v. Sipes*, was decided at the same time. Both state courts had treated the covenants as private contracts, outside the reach of the Constitution. ## The decision The Court split the question in two: - **The covenants themselves were not unconstitutional.** The [[Fourteenth Amendment]] restricts governments, not private individuals, so people who voluntarily followed a covenant were not violating it. - **Court enforcement was unconstitutional.** When a state court orders a family out of a home it lawfully bought, that is action by the state, and using the state's power to enforce racial exclusion violates the [[Equal Protection Clause]]. The practical result was that a covenant became a promise no one could be forced to keep. In 1953 the Court closed a loophole by ruling that sellers could not be sued for damages for breaking one. ## The lawyers The cases were part of the [[NAACP]]'s legal campaign against segregation. [[Thurgood Marshall]] argued the Detroit companion case, six years before *Brown v. Board of Education*. ## Connections - [[Redlining and Housing Discrimination]]: the federal system that covenants fed. - [[Fair Housing Act of 1968]]: the law that finally made discriminatory sales and rentals themselves illegal. - [[Jones v. Alfred H. Mayer Company]]: the 1968 case that reached private discrimination the Fourteenth Amendment could not. - [[Fourteenth Amendment]]