Restrictive Covenant

Effects of the Buchanan Decision

As African Americans placed increasing pressure on the imagined borders of residential whiteness, during World War I, whites across the north, midwest, and west responded with a wave of terroristic violence in African American communities in defense of their “right” to white-only communities. A series of white mob attacks during the “red summer” of 1919 from Oklahoma to the nation's capital spoke to the intensity with which whites understood the possibility of racial mixture as a threat to their very survival. While working-class whites pursued violent means to maintain residential segregation, real estate professionals began to integrate racial and ethnic restrictive covenants into real estate documents in order to reassure anxious white homeowners who were convinced that proximity to black neighbors would cripple their property values.

Racial and ethnic restrictive covenants attempted to sidestep the Buchanan decision by privatizing the enforcement of de jure racism outside the Jim Crow south. In Buchanan, the court [Page 1838]had limited the power of legislatures to place racial conditions upon the sale or purchase of private property. Restrictive covenants, by contrast, framed racial exclusions as a component of any citizen's right to exclusive control over his or her property. However, because residential covenants, like wills of inheritance, were notarized and enforced by state officials, ostensibly “private” racial prejudices were once again backed up by the force of law. Even after the elimination of racial restrictive covenants, the logic of racial exclusion remained enshrined within notions of constitutionally protected property rights for decades to come. From suburban opposition to school busing in the 1970s to contemporary conflicts produced by the rise of all-white private subdivisions, the figure of “property rights” courses through organized opposition to racial integration.

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