Race, rights, and housing: A study of individual rights in residential segregation, 1917--1948

In 1948, the United States Supreme Court decided Shelley v. Kraemer (1948) making the first of many landmark decisions that eventually brought greater racial equality in a nation on the verge of radical social change. Shelley v. Kraemer outlawed the use of restrictive covenants based on race and set in motion what Gregory R. Weiher describes as a "dismantling of mechanisms which had traditionally been used to separate blacks and whites" (Weiher, 1991, p. 92). The process of this dismantling, however, stemmed from a longer period in American history when housing became a critical arena in which judges and politicians grappled with the sometimes ambiguous nature of legal precedents that held the rights of the individual as paramount over the interests of the community. Racially discriminatory practices in housing represents an essential framework to understand this difference since by its very nature it forces lawmakers to reconcile individual rights of homeowners with the respective communities of which they are a part. By looking at housing as the stage in which resolving such conflicts between individual and group rights emerged so visibly in the first half of the twentieth century, this paper offers a unique perspective to understand the role of racial discrimination in housing in highlighting the issue of individual versus collective rights in the United States' journey towards equality.