Existing comment:
George L. Vaughn to Thurgood Marshall concerning Shelley v. Kraemer, January 13, 1947.
Shelley v. Kraemer, 1948
For more than twenty years the NAACP initiated lawsuits to nullify restrictive covenants with little success. In 1945, J. D. Shelley, a black man, purchased a home in St. Louis covered by a restrictive covenant. Louis Kraemer, a white neighbor, obtained an injunction in the Missouri Supreme Court to bar occupancy. The NAACP appealed Shelley v. Kraemer along with similar cases from Detroit and Washington, D.C., to the U.S. Supreme Court. On May 3, 1948, the court affirmed in Shelley v. Kraemer the right of individuals to make restrictive covenants, but held that the Fourteenth Amendment's equal protection clause prohibited state courts from enforcing the contracts. |