Racial Covenants and Housing Segregation, Yesterday and Today
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Description
This chapter explores the role of privately created racially restrictive covenants in American housing segregation. Racial covenants were common in residential deeds in the early twentieth century, purporting to prevent future owners from selling their homes to “non-Caucasians.” These covenants were treated increasingly leniently in the courts for the first forty years of the century. That pattern changed abruptly with the 1948 decision Shelley v. Kraemer, which rendered racially restrictive covenants unenforceable in the courts. Despite Shelley, however, racial covenants continued to be written into new deeds until the practice was made illegal through the Fair Housing Act of 1968. Even thereafter, however, racial covenants continued to appear in real estate records. Today, overt racial restrictions are widely ignored, but they are still very difficult to eradicate from the old records. This chapter gives some possible answers regarding their persistence, including the “sticky” characteristics of Anglo-American property law, as well as the response of real estate and finance professionals to what they have considered to be market demand.
Source Publication
Race and Real Estate
Source Editors/Authors
Adrienne Brown, Valerie Smith
Publication Date
2016
Recommended Citation
Rose, Carol M. and Brooks, Richard R. W., "Racial Covenants and Housing Segregation, Yesterday and Today" (2016). Faculty Chapters. 250.
https://gretchen.law.nyu.edu/fac-chapt/250
