Shelley v. Kraemer, decided by the U.S. Supreme Court on May 3, 1948, made racially restrictive housing covenants unenforceable in American courts. The Court held that while private individuals could voluntarily agree to such covenants, no state court could use its power to enforce them, because judicial enforcement counted as government action barred by the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.1Justia. Shelley v. Kraemer, 334 U.S. 1 (1948) The covenants stayed on paper; the legal machinery that gave them force was taken away.
What a Racially Restrictive Covenant Was
Racially restrictive covenants were clauses written into property deeds or signed as neighborhood-wide agreements. They prohibited the sale, rental, or occupancy of homes by people of specified races or ethnicities, and they ran with the land, binding successive owners for years or decades.
The covenant at the center of the case was signed in 1911 by property owners in a St. Louis neighborhood. It restricted occupancy for fifty years, barring anyone “not of the Caucasian race” and specifically targeting “people of the Negro or Mongolian Race.”1Justia. Shelley v. Kraemer, 334 U.S. 1 (1948) Similar agreements blanketed neighborhoods in cities across the country and targeted Black, Asian American, and Jewish families.
The Two Cases the Court Consolidated
In 1945, J.D. and Ethel Lee Shelley, an African American couple, bought a home on Labadie Avenue in St. Louis. They did not know a racial covenant covered the property. Louis Kraemer, a white neighbor, sued to strip the Shelleys of their title and remove them from the home. The trial court ruled for the Shelleys, but the Missouri Supreme Court reversed, holding the 1911 covenant enforceable and ordering the family to leave.
A parallel case came out of Detroit. In 1944, Orsel and Minnie McGhee, who were Black, bought a home on Seebaldt Street. The deed carried a 1934 covenant providing that the property “shall not be used or occupied by any person or persons except those of the Caucasian race.”2Legal Information Institute. Shelley v. Kraemer Neighbors sued to enforce it. The Supreme Court consolidated the cases and heard them together.
The State Action Argument
The Fourteenth Amendment restricts government conduct, not private choices. Two neighbors can privately agree to almost anything, and the Court had long held that the amendment “erects no shield against merely private conduct, however discriminatory or wrongful.”3Legal Information Institute. State Action Doctrine The question in Shelley was what happens when a party walks into a courtroom and asks a judge to enforce that private agreement.
The petitioners, represented by Thurgood Marshall of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and attorney Loren Miller,4Oyez. Shelley v. Kraemer argued that when a court clerk dockets the case, a judge hears testimony, and a state supreme court orders a family out of its home, the state is no longer a bystander. The court is the instrument carrying out the discrimination. If a city ordinance barring Black families from a neighborhood would violate the Fourteenth Amendment, then a court injunction producing the identical result does the same thing through a different door.
What the Court Held
Chief Justice Fred Vinson delivered the opinion for a Court of six. Justices Robert H. Jackson, Stanley Reed, and Wiley Rutledge recused themselves.1Justia. Shelley v. Kraemer, 334 U.S. 1 (1948) The reason was never officially stated, though Justice John Paul Stevens later wrote in his memoir that they likely stepped aside because they owned homes subject to racial covenants.
The decision drew a bright line. Racially restrictive covenants, standing alone, did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment. Private individuals could voluntarily choose to honor them. But “it is violative of the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment for state courts to enforce them.” The Court held that “the actions of state courts and judicial officers in their official capacities are actions of the states within the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment,” and that by enforcing these covenants, “the states acted to deny petitioners the equal protection of the laws.”1Justia. Shelley v. Kraemer, 334 U.S. 1 (1948)
The Shelleys and the McGhees kept their homes. More broadly, any homeowner who violated a racial covenant was safe from a court-ordered eviction or a forced reversal of a sale. The covenants still existed in the deed books. The legal mechanism behind them was gone.
Damages: The Loophole Barrows Closed
Shelley blocked injunctions, but it left a question open. If a neighbor could not get a court to remove a Black family, could that neighbor sue the seller for money damages instead for breaking the covenant? Five years later, in Barrows v. Jackson (1953), the Supreme Court answered no. Allowing state courts to award damages would, in the Court’s words, “encourage the use of restrictive covenants” and put the state’s “sanction behind the covenants.” The Court said it would “not permit or require California to coerce respondent to respond in damages for failure to observe a restrictive covenant that this Court would deny California the right to enforce in equity.”5Legal Information Institute. Barrows v. Jackson, 346 U.S. 249 (1953) After Barrows, neither injunctions nor damages were available. Racial covenants were, for practical legal purposes, dead.
Unenforceable Is Not the Same as Illegal
Shelley and Barrows made racial covenants unenforceable. Neither made them illegal to write. People kept including them in deeds, and they continued to appear in property records for years. Congress addressed that gap twenty years later. The Fair Housing Act of 1968 made it unlawful to discriminate in housing based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin, and it prohibited publishing or distributing any notice or statement indicating a racial preference or limitation in connection with a property sale or rental.6Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 42 U.S.C. 3604 Shelley said courts could not enforce these covenants. The Fair Housing Act said they could not lawfully be created in the first place.
What Shelley Did and Did Not Change on the Ground
Shelley is rightly counted as a landmark civil rights decision, but its effect on housing segregation was uneven. Other tools of housing discrimination kept working after 1948: redlining by banks, discriminatory steering by real estate agents, exclusionary zoning, and outright intimidation.
Research has found that Shelley did accelerate some neighborhood transitions from white to Black occupancy after 1948 and changed the dynamics of the dual housing market. Increased Black mobility also produced sharper economic segregation within Black communities during the 1950s and 1960s, as wealthier Black families moved into previously restricted areas while lower-income families remained in overcrowded neighborhoods.
The economic aftermath is still visible. Black homeownership rates remain substantially lower than white homeownership rates, and homes in predominantly Black neighborhoods are valued significantly less than comparable homes in predominantly white neighborhoods. The racial wealth gap that restrictive covenants helped cement has narrowed only modestly.
Covenant Language Still in Deeds Today
One strange legacy of the ruling is that unenforceable covenant language still sits in millions of property records. It has no legal effect, but homeowners sometimes discover it during a title search or a refinance.
A growing number of states have enacted laws giving homeowners a process to remove or formally void discriminatory covenant language. The mechanisms vary. Some states let a homeowner file a short modification document with the county recorder declaring the discriminatory provisions void; others require a brief review by a county attorney. Filing fees are often nominal or waived. These procedures generally do not destroy the original document, so the historical record is preserved, but a new filing makes clear the language is legally void and repudiated.
If you find racial covenant language in your own records, your county recorder’s office can tell you what process your state provides. The language carries no legal weight either way. Many homeowners choose to strike it as a matter of principle.