Litigating Racial Justice at the Grassroots: The Shelley Family, Black Realtors, and Shelley v. Kraemer (1948)

Abstract

Litigating Racial Justice at the Grassroots: The Shelley Family, Black Realtors, and Shelley v. Kraemer (1948) JEFFREY D. GONDA The night of May 3rd, 1948 was a sleepless one in the modest brick home at 4600 Labadie Avenue in St. Louis. For the blue-collar migrant family ofeight ensconced on the property’s first floor, it was unlike anything they could have imagined when they first arrived in the city from their native Mississippi in 1940. Excitement and relief washed in waves over the home’s owners, J.D. and Ethel Lee Shelley, as congratulatory phone calls poured in from across the country and overseas. Their triumph in the United States Supreme Court earlier that day would soon appear in banner headlines atop the nation’s African-American weekly newspa­ pers, heralding—according to some—“the beginning of the end of the Negro ghetto.” But for the Shelleys, the victory had a simpler significance. After all, it would be the first night in nearly three years and the only night since they had purchased the Labadie Avenue home without the threat of a court-imposed eviction over their heads.1 The home itselfwas rather unremarkable. It barely fit the large family and Ethel Shelley would remark that “[o]f course it ain’t enough.” Yet it represented something much greater than any floor plan or lot size could quantify. The home on Labadie was both a symbol and a material embodiment of prog­ ress and security for the hard-working couple, one that millions ofblack Americans strove for but found maddeningly elusive in the wake of World War II. The strictures of residential segregation, enforced by a combination of custom, discriminatory business practices, federal incentives, legal mechanisms, and violence conspired to make access to decent homes a faint hope for the vast majority ofthe nation’s black urban communities. Indeed, the Shelleys had very nearly lost their claim to their own piece of postwar prosperity.2 330 JOURNAL OF SUPREME COURT HISTORY At the heart ofthe family’s troubles were discriminatory instruments known as racial restrictive covenants. Since the 1890s, white homebuilders and homeowners had used these agreements to prohibit African Americans and other minorities from occupying properties in designated neighborhoods. By the 1940s, civil rights advocates in the North and West had come to view covenants as one of the most pernicious obstacles to black social and economic progress and perhaps the founda­ tional building block ofthe modem American ghetto. The right to access decent homes became an especially pressing issue at the forefront of black activists’ sociopolitical agendas in the waning months of World War II and in the war’s immediate aftermath. The Shelleys’ case against the restriction covering their home would appear before the U.S. Supreme Court in January of 1948 as Shelley v. Kraemer and served as the culmination of the battle waged against covenants by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and local legal activists across the country.3 Despite the significance that contempo­ rary observers assigned to the unanimous victory, Shelley has lingered at the margins of Civil Rights Movement history. The case has drawn relatively sparing notice even from those historians whose work pushes the boundaries of the Movement outside of the Deep South and back into the pre-Rrown v. Board ofEducation (1954) era. Much of the blame for Shelley's place at the periphery falls on the largely undisturbed tenacity ofhousing segregation and the seemingly narrow utility of the Court’s ruling that only judicial enforcement of restrictive covenants, rather than covenants themselves, constituted dis­ criminatory state action prohibited by the Fourteenth Amendment. Also at issue, how­ ever, is a larger unease with incorporating legal history—and its tendency to privilege the actions of great litigators and jurists or ostensibly abstract principles of law—into the heart of a field that has spent much of the last two decades emphasizing local grassroots activism and the everyday experiences of non-elite community members. Though the recent work ofhistorians like Tomiko BrownNagin and her brilliant examination of civil rights lawyering in Atlanta have begun to bridge this gulf, many Movement historians still tend to eye legal history...