What are racially restrictive covenants?

Introduction

Rose, Carol M. “Racially Restrictive Covenants—Were They Dignity Takings?” Law & Social Inquiry 41, no. 4 (2016): 939–55. http://www.jstor.org/stable/26630894.

Lasting Impact

Atuahene, Bernadette. “Dignity Takings and Dignity Restoration: Creating a New Theoretical Framework for Understanding Involuntary Property Loss and the Remedies Required.” Law & Social Inquiry 41, no. 4 (2016): 796–823. http://www.jstor.org/stable/26630887. P. 797

Racially Restrictive Covenants were rhetorical mandates implemented by private subdividers and developers in real estate transactions all over the United States in the early twentieth century. When invoked, they barred certain races and ethnic groups from renting, owning, or leasing residential housing properties, disproportionately affecting African Americans. The language of these regulations varied, but their intentions remained the same: keep White neighborhoods White, and their property values high. A string of Supreme Court rulings during this period, namely Corrigan V. Buckley (1926), declared racial covenants distinct from racial zoning, which operated in the public sector and therefore required state intervention to uphold equal treatment laws. Thus, racial covenants became a way for private actors in the North and the South to constitutionally deny large populations access to wealth, safety, and stability. These covenants were not simply the product of a segregated society, but acted as an essential tool that serviced the severity of the Jim Crow era, actively working to ensure unequal opportunities for Americans based on their race or ethnicity for decades. In 1948, the Shelley V. Kraemer decision revised that the covenants did in fact necessitate state action, though was rendered unenforceable on a large scale and covenants lingered in land agreements. However, a second effort proved more successful. The 1968 Fair Housing Act ruled that all past or current racially restrictive covenants were illegal and defunct.

Scholar Carol M. Rose considers the actions outlined and enabled by racial covenants to be classified as ‘dignity takings’, a targeted offense by a powerful entity “with the object of humiliating and terrorizing” (994) a minority group. Rose draws a connection between the destruction of Jewish property by the Nazi party in Kristallnacht and  

This concept builds upon Bernadette Atuahene’s framework of ‘dignity taking’ and ‘dignity restoration’, developed using South Africa’s post-apartheid Land Restitution Commission as her central example of involuntary property loss and intentional return