In honor of Black History Month, Scotus blog is running a series of guest posts on race and the Supreme Court. My post appears today, entitled “The Neglected Case of Buchanan v. Warley.” It’s an excerpt from my Rehabilitating Lochner book, due out next Spring from University of Chicago Press. Here’s the beginning:
Buchanan v. Warley is one of the most significant civil rights cases decided before the modern civil rights era. Starting in 1910, many cities in the South, border states, and lower Midwest, responded to a wave of African-American in-migration from rural areas by passing laws mandating residential segregation in housing. More cities were ready to follow suit if the laws survived constitutional challenges. Several southern state supreme courts upheld the laws against constitutional challenges. In 1917, however, the Buchanan Court unanimously invalidated a Louisville residential segregation law as a deprivation of liberty and property without due process of law.
Although some scholars have portrayed Buchanan as only vindicating white people’s right to alienate property, the opinion’s text belies that understanding. The right at issue, according to the Court, was “the civil right of a white man to dispose of his property if he saw fit to do so to a person of color and of a colored person to make such disposition to a white person.” “Colored persons,” Justice Day wrote for the Court, “are citizens of the United States and have the right to purchase property and enjoy and use the same without laws discriminating against them solely on account of color.”
Crunchy Frog says:
I’ve never understood the whole “won’t sell my house to [minority]” mentality. Why would I give a rat’s behind who buys my house, as long as the escrow clears? I’m moving. If the neighbors don’t like the new inhabitants, that’s their problem, not mine. I’m going to a nicer place anyways.
February 10, 2010, 3:16 pmrichard says:
I’ve never understood the whole “won’t sell my house to [minority]” mentality.
You may not understand it but that mentality was common. When I bought my first house in 1984 in Los Angeles, there was a recorded covenant prohibiting the owner (me) from selling to a non-Caucasian and prohibitng non-Caucasians from residing at the property (except in servant’s quarters). The covenant was, of course, unenforceable but it was a vivid reminder about how things used to be even outside the Deep South.
February 10, 2010, 3:34 pmMark N. says:
@Crunchy Frog: I believe the case here was that of owners who did want to sell their houses to minorities, but were prevented from doing so by state or local ordinances. The Buchanan v. Warley holding was that the state could not interfere in a voluntary transaction between a willing white seller and a willing non-white buyer.
February 10, 2010, 3:39 pmarchive says:
I haven’t read the work of the scholars who say that- but they need to learn how to take a hint. If you are in a society where the public strongly favors a certain policy, you don’t inch things the other way by openly declaring your intent to undermine it– you drape your decision in rhetoric that appeals to the dominant strain of society.
February 10, 2010, 5:58 pmScotus Blog Post on Buchanan v. Warley | Liberal Whoppers says:
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February 10, 2010, 7:47 pm