The history of segregation in California ran on four main tracks: racially restrictive housing covenants backed by federal lending policy, alien land laws that barred Asian immigrants from owning property, school policies that sorted children by race or ethnicity, and marriage statutes that criminalized interracial unions. There was never a single Jim Crow code. Instead, state statutes, local administrative decisions, and privately drafted deed restrictions worked together, and California courts enforced them. The system was dismantled piece by piece between the 1880s and the 1960s through a set of rulings, several of which reached constitutional conclusions before the U.S. Supreme Court did.
Housing Covenants and Redlining
Housing was the most durable mechanism of racial separation in the state. Developers and homeowner associations wrote restrictive covenants into deeds across Los Angeles, San Francisco, Oakland, and other cities, prohibiting the sale, rental, or occupancy of the property by people of designated races. The clauses named Black, Asian American, and Mexican American residents directly. Because covenants ran with the land, they bound future buyers and locked entire neighborhoods into racial homogeneity for decades.
The federal government promoted the practice. The Federal Housing Administration’s 1938 Underwriting Manual warned against “the infiltration of inharmonious racial groups” and recommended that deed restrictions include “prohibition of the occupancy of properties except by the race for which they are intended.”1U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. Federal Housing Administration Underwriting Manual The FHA offered favorable loan terms to developments that adopted covenants and denied mortgage insurance in neighborhoods where non-white residents already lived. That practice of geographic lending discrimination is known as redlining.2Federal Reserve History. Redlining
Covenants were nominally private, but they depended on state courts to enforce them. When a Black or Asian American family bought into a restricted tract, neighbors sued to void the sale, and California courts routinely granted the relief. Judicial enforcement was the pressure point that eventually brought the whole system down.
The Alien Land Laws
California targeted Asian immigrants, and Japanese farmers in particular, through a separate mechanism. The 1913 Alien Land Law barred “aliens ineligible for citizenship” from owning agricultural land. Federal naturalization law at the time limited citizenship to white persons and persons of African descent, so the statute reached Japanese, Chinese, Korean, and Indian immigrants without naming them.3Office of the Historian. May 19, 1913 – Historical Documents Property acquired in violation of the law would escheat to the state.
Japanese immigrant families tried to hold land through their American-born children, who were citizens by birth. The legislature closed that route in 1920, restricting even leases and corporate ownership. The laws stayed on the books for decades and did lasting damage to Japanese American farming communities well before the wartime internment of roughly 120,000 Japanese Americans from the West Coast under Executive Order 9066 in 1942. The U.S. Supreme Court began dismantling the statute in 1948 in Oyama v. California, holding that applying the escheat provisions against a minor U.S. citizen because his Japanese-born father had paid for the land violated the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause.4Justia. Oyama v. California, 332 U.S. 633 (1948)
Segregated Schools
California ran three parallel school segregation regimes, each with its own legal basis.
Chinese and Asian American Students
In Tape v. Hurley (1885), the California Supreme Court held that a Chinese American child born in San Francisco could not be excluded from public school, reading state law to require schools be “open for the admission of all children.” The legislature responded by amending Political Code Section 1662 to authorize separate schools “for children of Mongolian or Chinese descent” and requiring that where such schools existed, those children “must not be admitted into any other school.” The ruling won a principle; the legislature built a parallel and inferior system anyway, one that persisted well into the twentieth century.
Mexican American Students
No state statute required separate schools for Mexican American children, but local districts across Southern California created them through administrative discretion, defending the practice with claims about English-language instruction and “Americanization.” By the 1940s, roughly 80 percent of students of Mexican heritage in California attended separate schools.5National Park Service. Education Inequalities in California Schools During World War II Those schools operated out of run-down buildings, used cast-off furniture and textbooks, and emphasized vocational training. The pedagogical rationale was pretext.
Black Students
California had at points allowed separate schools for Black children, but Wysinger v. Crookshank (1890) held that an 1880 amendment to the state’s Political Code had ended legal authority for that segregation. The decision addressed only Black students; the statutory segregation of Asian American students and the administrative segregation of Mexican American students continued.
Anti-Miscegenation and Public Accommodations Laws
California’s first legislature in 1850 barred marriages between white persons and “Negroes or mulattoes” and imposed criminal penalties on the parties and any officiant. The prohibition, codified as Civil Code Sections 60 and 69, was expanded twice: in 1901 to reach “Mongolians” and in 1933 to reach “members of the Malay race.”6California Supreme Court Historical Society. Overturning California’s Ban on Interracial Marriages The 1933 amendment came after a court held that Filipinos, classified as “Malay,” fell outside the existing ban on marriages with “Mongolians.”
Section 69 barred county clerks from issuing marriage licenses for any covered union, and Section 60 declared the marriages “illegal and void.”7California Supreme Court Resources. Perez v. Sharp – California Supreme Court Opinion Couples who crossed the line faced criminal exposure and the legal nullification of their family.
California also passed civil rights legislation in the late nineteenth century prohibiting discrimination in public accommodations such as theaters and restaurants. Enforcement was weak. People of color were denied service, seated separately, or refused entry at businesses throughout the state, and the gap between text and practice was wide.
The Cases That Ended Legal Segregation
The segregation system came apart through a run of cases in the 1940s. Several set constitutional precedents ahead of the U.S. Supreme Court.
The Sugar Hill Covenant Case (1945)
White residents in the Sugar Hill neighborhood of Los Angeles sued to enforce restrictive covenants against Black homeowners, including well-known figures in the entertainment industry. A Los Angeles Superior Court judge ruled for the Black residents, finding the covenants violated the Fourteenth Amendment. It was among the earliest decisions to declare racial covenants unconstitutional, predating Shelley v. Kraemer by three years.
Mendez v. Westminster (1946–1947)
Mexican American families in Orange County challenged the routing of their children to separate, inferior schools. A federal district court ruled the practice unconstitutional in 1946, and the Ninth Circuit affirmed in 1947, holding that the districts had acted “entirely without authority of California law” and that enforcing segregation “under color or pretense of California law” violated the Fourteenth Amendment’s due process and equal protection guarantees.8Justia Law. Westminster School Dist. of Orange County v. Mendez, 161 F.2d 774 Two months later, Governor Earl Warren signed legislation ending all remaining legal school segregation in California, making it the first state to formally desegregate its public schools.9United States Courts. Background – Mendez v. Westminster Re-Enactment
Perez v. Sharp (1948)
Andrea Perez, a white woman, and Sylvester Davis, a Black man, applied for a marriage license in Los Angeles County and were refused under Civil Code Section 69. In a 4-3 decision, the California Supreme Court struck down the anti-miscegenation statute.10Justia Law. Perez v. Sharp California became the first state in the twentieth century to invalidate its ban on interracial marriage on constitutional grounds.11California Supreme Court Historical Society. Perez v. Sharp – California Legal History Volume 17, 2022 The decision stood almost alone until the U.S. Supreme Court reached the same conclusion nationally in Loving v. Virginia (1967).
Shelley v. Kraemer (1948)
The same year, the U.S. Supreme Court held in Shelley v. Kraemer that while private parties could voluntarily abide by racial covenants, no state court could enforce them. Judicial enforcement was itself state action and violated the Fourteenth Amendment.12Justia. Shelley v. Kraemer, 334 U.S. 1 (1948) The covenants stayed in the deeds; the courts could no longer enforce them.
Proposition 14 and the Fair Housing Backlash
The legal victories did not settle the politics. In 1963, the California legislature passed the Rumford Fair Housing Act, prohibiting racial discrimination in the sale and rental of most residential property. The real estate industry answered with Proposition 14 on the 1964 ballot, a state constitutional amendment guaranteeing property owners “absolute discretion” to refuse to sell, lease, or rent to anyone. Voters approved it by nearly two-thirds.
The California Supreme Court struck the amendment down, and the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed in Reitman v. Mulkey (1967). The Court held that Proposition 14 did not merely repeal fair housing protections; it “authorize[d] racial discrimination in the housing market” and established “the right to discriminate as a basic state policy,” which amounted to significant state involvement in private discrimination in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment.13Justia. Reitman v. Mulkey, 387 U.S. 369 (1967) Proposition 14 remained formally in the state constitution until voters repealed it in 1974.
Removing a Racial Covenant From a California Deed
Thousands of California properties still carry racially restrictive covenants in their recorded deeds. The covenants have been unenforceable since 1948, but the language turns up in title searches and property sales. State law provides a way to strike it.
Under Government Code Section 12956.2, anyone who holds or is acquiring an ownership interest in a property covered by a discriminatory covenant can record a Restrictive Covenant Modification. The document must include a complete copy of the original deed language with the unlawful restrictions redacted. Before recording, county counsel reviews the modification to confirm that the original language is unlawfully discriminatory. The county recorder may waive the recording fee.14California Legislative Information. California Government Code 12956-2 Review can take up to three months. Once recorded, the modified covenant replaces the original as the operative restriction on the property. Title companies, escrow companies, real estate agents, and county recorders can also file the modification on the owner’s behalf.