Shelley v. Kraemer 1948
| Author | Daniel Brannen, Richard Hanes, Elizabeth Shaw |
| Pages | 774-778 |
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Petitioner: J.D. Shelley
Respondent: Louis Kraemer
Petitioner's Claim: That contracts preventing African Americans from purchasing homes violate the Fourteenth Amendment.
Chief Lawyers for Petitioner: George L. Vaughn and Herman Willer
Chief Lawyer for Respondent: Gerald L. Seegers
Justices for the Court: Hugo Lafayette Black, Harold Burton, William O. Douglas, Felix Frankfurter, Frank Murphy, Frederick Moore Vinson
Justices Dissenting: None (Robert H. Jackson, Stanley Forman Reed, and Wiley Blount Rutledge did not participate)
Date of Decision: May 3, 1948
Decision: The Supreme Court said the Fourteenth Amendment prevents courts from enforcing race discrimination in real estate contracts.
Significance: Shelley ended a powerful form of race discrimination in housing.
When the American Civil War ended in 1865, the United States ended slavery with the Thirteenth Amendment. Three years later in 1868, it adopted the Fourteenth Amendment. The Equal Protection Clause of the
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Fourteenth Amendment says a state may not "deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws." The main purpose of the Equal Protection Clause was to prevent states from discriminating against African Americans.
The Fourteenth Amendment only applies to the states. It does not prevent race discrimination by individual people. After 1868, racial prejudice led many people to continue race discrimination on their own.
In 1911 there was a neighborhood in St. Louis, Missouri, where thirty-nine people owned fifty-seven parcels of land. In February of that year, thirty of the owners signed an agreement not to rent or sell their property to African Americans or Asian Americans. Such an agreement is called a restrictive covenant. The owners who signed the restrictive covenant had forty-seven of the fifty-seven parcels in the neighborhood.
In August 1945, J.D. Shelley and his wife, who were African Americans, bought a parcel of land in the neighborhood from someone named Fitzgerald. The Shelleys were unaware of the restrictive covenant. Louis Kraemer and his wife, who owned another parcel in the neighborhood, sued the Shelleys in the Circuit Court of St. Louis. The Kraemers asked the court to take the Shelleys' land away and give it back to Fitzgerald.
The court ruled in favor of the Shelleys because the restrictive covenant did not...
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