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• 1 2022-12-02T06:25:15-08:00 Racial Covenants 5 plain 2022-12-06T17:16:41-08:00      Restrictive covenants were a tool used by white homeowners and developers to lock out African Americans from accessing housing in certain geographic areas. They came in the form of contracts or clauses written into deeds that restricted the owner of the property from selling it to an African American individual or family and other minority groups. The mass exodus of African Americans to the North during the Great Migration prompted discriminatory actions from White communities. The use of zoning ordinances to lock out multifamily units from being built lost its desirability because they impacted not only communities of color, but White communities as well. Racial covenants were a convenient and less restrictive tool, to Whites, for segregationist to employ to maintain the racial order.
  
       The contracts were between private parties and therefore believed to be bulletproof to civil rights challenges based on the 1926 Corrigan v. Buckley decision. In that case the Court ruled that it lacked the jurisdiction to scrutinize private contracts and that the NAACP’s use of the Constitution to address them was “plainly without color of merit and frivolous”. Not to be deterred, the NAACP came back to the Court in the 1948 case, Shelly v. Kramer, which finally took actions against restrictive covenants. The Court ruled unanimously that the racial covenants themselves were not void, the government cannot enforce them because that would constitute a state action under the 14th Amendment. While considered a victory, Shelly v. Kramer’s real-world effects in terms of dismantling housing discrimination were minimal. Racism is a hard habit to break.