Shelley v. Kraemer
The Supreme Court ruled that when state courts step in to enforce private agreements barring people from owning or living in homes because of their race, that court action itself counts as unconstitutional state discrimination.
The decision struck down the use of racially restrictive covenants in Missouri and Michigan, opening the door for Black families to buy and keep homes in neighborhoods that had tried to exclude them through private contracts.
“We have no doubt that there has been state action in these cases in the full and complete sense of the phrase.”
The Court's core holding that judicial enforcement of a private covenant is itself government action.
How it got here: Missouri's highest court ordered the Shelleys' sale undone and enforced the covenant; Michigan's highest court upheld an order evicting the McGhees; both families sought Supreme Court review.
The Case in Depth
What happened
In St. Louis, white homeowners on Labadie Avenue had signed a 1911 agreement barring non-white occupancy of their block; a Black couple, the Shelleys, later bought a house there without knowing of it. In Detroit, a similar agreement covered a block where a Black family, the McGhees, bought and moved into a home. Neighbors in both cities sued to force the Black buyers out.
The question before the Court
Could a state court order a Black family evicted from a home they had legally bought, just to enforce a private neighborhood agreement barring non-white owners?
Why it matters
Black families across the country who had been blocked from neighborhoods by racial covenants could now rely on courts to protect, rather than undo, their home purchases. The ruling meant private discriminatory agreements about housing became legally unenforceable nationwide, reshaping how segregation could operate in American real estate markets.
What changes now
The rulings of the Missouri and Michigan supreme courts were reversed, meaning the Black families could keep their homes and courts elsewhere could no longer enforce similar racial covenants. This was a final merits decision, not a temporary order, and it effectively ended court enforcement of racially restrictive housing covenants nationwide, though the underlying private agreements themselves were not declared void.
What this does not decide
The Court expressly limited its holding to court enforcement of these agreements; it did not rule that the restrictive covenants themselves are void or illegal, and it did not reach whether enforcement also violated due process or the privileges-and-immunities guarantees, since it found the equal protection violation alone sufficient.
How the Court got there
The legal reasoning, step by step
- The Court first established that the Fourteenth Amendment's equal protection guarantee restrains only 'state action' -- conduct by government, not by private individuals acting on their own -- so a purely private racial agreement, standing alone and never enforced in court, violates no constitutional right.
- The Court then asked whether a state court's act of enforcing such a private agreement -- ordering eviction or voiding a sale -- itself counts as state action. Drawing on decades of precedent treating judicial rulings as government action just like a statute or an executive order, the Court held that a court's enforcement order is fully attributable to the state.
- Applying that principle, the Court found that without the state courts' intervention, the Black buyers in both cases would have been free to keep and occupy their homes; it was only the coercive power of the courts that denied them that right based on race.
- The Court rejected the argument that enforcing covenants excluding white buyers just as readily would make the practice race-neutral, reasoning that the Fourteenth Amendment protects individual rights, and it is no defense that a government practice discriminates against everyone in turn.
- The Court concluded that because the state courts' enforcement singled out these buyers for unequal treatment based solely on race, that enforcement amounted to a denial of equal protection of the laws, regardless of how neutral the underlying private agreement's text or the state's common-law enforcement policy might otherwise seem.
Doctrinal impact
Cases affected by this decision
Distinguishes Corrigan v. Buckley (271 U.S. 323)
That case involved D.C. land and never raised a Fourteenth Amendment claim, so it decided nothing about court enforcement here.
Reaffirms Buchanan v. Warley (245 U.S. 60)
Relied on as establishing that governments cannot bar people from owning or occupying property because of race.
Reaffirms Civil Rights Cases (109 U.S. 3)
Reaffirmed that the Fourteenth Amendment reaches only government action, not purely private conduct.