New
book investigates racial discrimination in real estate
Book by
Jeffrey Gonda describes the fight against deed “covenants”
The seeds of
the Civil Rights Movement lie in a long series of struggles to overcome unfair
policies and practices, many related to housing segregation. Professor Jeffrey
Gonda examines one such practice in his new book Unjust Deeds, published this week by the University of North
Carolina Press.
In the book, Gonda details the events surrounding the NAACP’s campaign to
challenge housing discrimination and the landmark Supreme Court case that
helped to transform civil rights protest in the nation's courts.
From the 1890s to the 1940s, many real estate deeds had
legal provisions, called ‘”racial restrictive covenants,” that prohibited the
occupancy of African Americans in their respective properties. Unjust Deeds examines the struggles of
six families in three cities — St. Louis, Detroit, and Washington, D.C. — and
how their personal fights precipitated a three year-effort to stop enforcement
of these restrictions. With the help of activists and lawyers at the NAACP,
these cases made their way through the United States court system until finally
reaching our nation’s highest court.
The 1948 Supreme Court case, Shelley v. Kraemer, proved to be a major triumph for these families
and for the NAACP, allowing the families to stay in their homes and forbidding
courts from enforcing these contracts in the future. Though restrictive
covenants were only one of the many tools used to impose housing segregation,
the campaign against them had a powerful effect for African American activists
and communities in the years leading up to the Civil Rights Movement. Gonda’s
book explains the importance of this legal battle and how its legacy continues
to affect families, neighborhoods, and the country as a whole to this day.
Jeffrey Gonda is an assistant professor of history at the
Maxwell School where he teaches courses on modern African American history,
law, and politics. He received his PhD in history and African American studies
from Yale University (2012). His research on the Shelley family won the Supreme
Court Historical Society’s Hughes-Gossett Award in 2014. 10/09/15