DEED RESTRICTIONS / COVENANTS
Prior to the New Deal, direct governmental support for segregation "consisted primarily of the judicial enforcement of privately drawn restrictive covenants." Frequently included in property deeds, racially restrictive covenants controlled how property could be developed or used, or who could live on the property. By the 1920s, deeds in nearly every new housing development in the North prevented the use or ownership of homes by anyone other than "the Caucasian race." Many new homes still recorded racially restrictive covenants even after the Supreme Court held them unenforceable in 1948. As a result, people of color were excluded from many communities, limiting where they could settle and beginning the trend toward increased segregation. During the 1920s, property values became tied to race "as a means to legitimize racial exclusion and protect racial boundaries."
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Arnold R. Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940-1960, at 9-10 (1983).
Testimony of Thomas Sugrue (Chicago), at 1-2; see also Testimony of Jesus Hernandez (Los Angeles), at 5 ("Developers of new suburban tracts used overtly racial covenants as a means to attract buyers, assuring the safety of their investment through the use of ‘wise restrictions.’").
Testimony of Jesus Hernandez (Los Angeles), at 6 (noting that local records show new housing tracts in Sacramento recorded racially restrictive covenants as late as 1976, almost twenty years after the Supreme Court held that they were unenforceable in Shelley v. Kraemer, 334 U.S. 1, 22-23 (1948)).
Massey & Denton, American Apartheid, at 9-10, 43; Testimony of Jesus Hernandez (Los Angeles), at 6. In Chicago, African American families receiving public assistance paid two to three times more for rent than did White families receiving public assistance. Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto, at 5, 18.