Impact
Figure 20: Poverty in St. Louis Neighborhoods
Maps comparing racial makeup and levels of poverty in the city of St. Louis (2014).
Like many other Supreme Court cases related to racial justice, Shelley v. Kraemer’s enforcement and impact left many of its goals and ambitions unrealized. Notions of white popular sovereignty were not altered by the case, and were often even strengthened, leading to a wave of reactionary protests and violence from white homeowners seeking to maintain segregation in their neighborhoods (Gonda, 195). Institutions, both private and public, also found new loopholes and alternative means to uphold covenants or other forms of discriminations. The FHA did not alter its own policies to stop insuring mortgages to properties with covenants until 1949, and even then only applied this policy to newly established covenants added to deeds after the date of February 15th, 1950 (Rothstein, 87). This gap in enforcement allowed white property owners and developers time to add covenants to their property deeds without facing penalties for doing so. Yet developers and community associations found new ways to continue discrimination without explicitly racial covenants, including clauses that required any sale of property within the neighborhood be subject to vote within the association (Rothstein, 88). Even after the Shelley ruling, covenant cases continued to be brought to state-level court in the five years following, two of which upheld racial discrimination (Rothstein, 90). The creation of covenants mostly stopped after the 1950’s, but many were never taken out of their deeds and still remain today.
Shelley’s actual impact on racial integration of cities is still contested. Though segregation in urban areas declined somewhat in the 1950’s, its levels remained stagnant throughout the next two decades (Darden 681-682). Where Black families did get the chance to move into middle class urban neighborhoods, its positive impact on integration was often negated by “white flight”, the movement of white people away from diverse areas and often into the suburbs; still, Black families benefited from increased access to home ownership within cities, although these benefits mostly served those families already within the middle class (Gonda, 204). Though the decades following the case saw an increase in suburbanization of both Black and white populations, Black families were more likely to move into suburbs that were closer to cities, had a lower average socioeconomic status, and were more densely populated, while most wealthy, white suburbs did not see an increase in integration (Darden, 682).
Although Shelley did not remedy racial housing disparities as much as activists originally hoped, it still led to an increase in the amount and quality of properties available to Black homeseekers in urban areas across the country. Moreover, the case represented a more hopeful future for housing integration, both in the increased protections it offered for homeseekers and the legal precedent it set for future cases (Gonda, 207). Shelley’s more expansive view of state action was a stepping stone for later legal challenges of the “separate but equal” doctrine in the realm of housing and beyond.
As Crenshaw argues, the fight for racial equality can often leave us in the ambiguity between winning and losing, between important progress and reactionary movements and the new forms of institutional racism that come with them. Many scholars argue that the banning of racial covenants and other forms of explicit discrimination has given way to the era of “color-blind racism”, marked by the ideas that American society is a meritocracy and all groups should be treated identically under the law (Tran, 12). This shift has led discussions of disparities in housing to be treated with more neutral language, using terms like “density” and “socioeconomic status” to address gaps that were created by explicit racial discrmination (Connolly). Yet these disparities cannot be fully addressed and solved without knowledge of this complicated history of racialization, making our understanding of cases such as Shelley and their impacts all the more important.