Shelley v. Kraemer
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| Shelley v. Kraemer | ||||||||||||
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| Argued January 15, 1948 Decided May 3, 1948 |
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| 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 Forman Reed, Felix Frankfurter, William O. Douglas, Frank Murphy, Robert H. Jackson, Wiley Blount Rutledge, Harold Hitz Burton |
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| Case opinions | ||||||||||||
| Majority by: Vinson Joined by: Black, Frankfurter, Douglas, Murphy, Burton Reed, Jackson, Rutledge took no part in the consideration or decision of the case. |
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| Laws applied | ||||||||||||
| U.S. Const. amend. XIV | ||||||||||||
Shelley v. Kraemer, 334 U.S. 1, (1948), is a United States Supreme Court decision involving the enforceability of restrictive covenants which would prohibit a person from owning or occupying property on the basis of race. It is an important civil rights case.
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[edit] 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. Neighbors 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 Michigan where the McGhee's purchased land subject to a similar restrictive covenant. The Supreme Court consolidated the two cases for oral arguments.
[edit] 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?
[edit] 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. Parties may voluntarily abide by the terms of a restrictive covenant, but they may not seek 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 by a State is unconstitutional under the Fourteenth Amendment. The attorneys who argued the case were Thurgood Marshall and Loren Miller.
