"To Prevent Conflict and Ill-Feeling" | Louisville, 1914

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Detroit Publishing Co., c. 1906 · Library of Congress · AI-colorized. View the original.

A city law once counted the houses on this street, and then told you which of them you were allowed to live in.

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Detroit Publishing Co., c. 1906 · Library of Congress · AI-colorized. View the original.

Louisville, Kentucky, nineteen fourteen. The rule was simple. Count the houses on the block. Whichever race held the majority, the other could not move in.

The city gave it a title, and the title is the whole story. These are the city's own words.

Three years later the Supreme Court of the United States struck it down. Unanimously.

And the way it struck it down is the reason the racial covenant was invented.

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Detroit Publishing Co., c. 1900-1907 · Library of Congress · AI-colorized. View the original.

Louisville in nineteen-oh-six was a river city at the Falls of the Ohio, and the biggest city in Kentucky.

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Detroit Publishing Co., c. 1900-1910 · Library of Congress · AI-colorized. View the original.

These photographs are Detroit Publishing Company glass negatives. The colours are a machine's estimate; the originals are black and white and free at the Library of Congress.

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Detroit Publishing Co., c. 1900-1910 · Library of Congress · AI-colorized. View the original.

Packet boats still worked the wharf.

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Detroit Publishing Co., c. 1906 · Library of Congress · AI-colorized. View the original.

And a bridge crossed the river to Indiana.

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Detroit Publishing Co., c. 1906 · Library of Congress · AI-colorized. View the original.

And the money came off the tobacco floors, where the crop of half of Kentucky was auctioned in hogsheads.

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Detroit Publishing Co., c. 1906 · Library of Congress · AI-colorized. View the original.

Warehouses like this one stood all through the city.

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Detroit Publishing Co., c. 1900-1910 · Library of Congress · AI-colorized. View the original.

Downtown had electric cars and department stores.

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Detroit Publishing Co., c. 1900-1910 · Library of Congress · AI-colorized. View the original.

And hotels built to be looked at.

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Detroit Publishing Co., c. 1906 · Library of Congress · AI-colorized. View the original.

And out along the avenues there were blocks of tall brick houses with deep porches, which is where this story happens.

The ordinance was approved on the eleventh of May, nineteen fourteen. Section one made it unlawful for a Black person to move into a house on any block where more houses were held by white people.

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Detroit Publishing Co., c. 1906 · Library of Congress · AI-colorized. View the original.

Section two said the same thing in reverse, so that on paper the law fell on everybody equally.

Section three explained how to measure a block. From intersection to intersection, counting the side of the street with the even house numbers, and a house counts on the block its front door faces.

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Detroit Publishing Co., c. 1906 · Library of Congress · AI-colorized. View the original.

That is the sound of a law written by surveyors.

Section four is where it stops sounding neutral. Nothing already in place was disturbed. And nothing in the ordinance was to prevent white or Black servants and employees from living on the block where they worked.

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Detroit Publishing Co., c. 1906 · Library of Congress · AI-colorized. View the original.

So you could live on the block if you cleaned the houses on it. You could not live on it if you bought one.

Louisville was not alone, and you can prove it from the case file. When it reached Washington, the City of Richmond and a welfare association from St. Louis both filed briefs supporting the ordinance.

The case that came out of it was built on purpose. A lot was for sale on the corner of Thirty-Seventh Street, and the address is on the page.

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That is out in the west end, near the river.

The buyer put a condition in writing. He would not be required to accept the deed, or to pay, unless he had the right under the laws of Kentucky and the City of Louisville to occupy the property as a residence.

When the seller sued to force the sale through, the buyer answered that he was a Black man.

That of the ten houses on that block, eight were held by white people and two by Black people. And that the ordinance therefore forbade him to live there.

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Detroit Publishing Co., c. 1906 · Library of Congress · AI-colorized. View the original.

Both men wanted the same answer. The seller was Buchanan; the buyer was Warley. Nobody in this case was surprised by the defence, because the defence had been written into the offer.

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Detroit Publishing Co., c. 1906 · Library of Congress · AI-colorized. View the original.

It was filed in the Chancery Branch of the Jefferson Circuit Court, and the reply set up the Fourteenth Amendment. The point of the suit was to lose it, and then appeal.

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Detroit Publishing Co., c. 1906 · Library of Congress · AI-colorized. View the original.

The Court of Appeals of Kentucky, then the state's highest court, upheld the ordinance.

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Detroit Publishing Co., c. 1906 · Library of Congress · AI-colorized. View the original.

It printed the whole text of it into its opinion, which is why we can read every section tonight.

In Washington the city argued the case should not even be heard, because the rights complained of belonged to Black people and the man bringing the appeal was white.

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Detroit Publishing Co., c. 1906 · Library of Congress · AI-colorized. View the original.

The Court disposed of that in a paragraph. The property was his to sell.

The case was argued twice — in April nineteen sixteen, restored to the docket for reargument, and argued again in April nineteen seventeen.

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Detroit Publishing Co., c. 1906 · Library of Congress · AI-colorized. View the original.

The decision came down seven months after that.

Then it went to the statute Congress passed in eighteen sixty-six.

All citizens of the United States shall have the same right, in every State, as is enjoyed by white citizens, to inherit, purchase, lease, sell, hold and convey real and personal property.

And it asked itself a question. In the face of these constitutional and statutory provisions, can a white man be denied the right to dispose of his property to a purchaser, for the sole reason that the purchaser is a person of colour?

Louisville's answer was Plessy against Ferguson. Separate railway carriages had been upheld in eighteen ninety-six, and separate blocks were said to follow.

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Detroit Publishing Co., c. 1900-1910 · Library of Congress · AI-colorized. View the original.

The Court said no. In Plessy nobody had been refused transport. The rule was separation on equal terms, not exclusion.

Louisville's second answer was closer to home. The Berea College case, in which Kentucky had made it a crime to teach Black and white students in the same school, and this same Court had let the conviction stand.

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The Court pointed out what that decision had actually turned on. The state's power to amend the charter of its own corporation. The constitutional question was never reached.

Then it borrowed a sentence from the Supreme Court of Georgia. The essence of the constitutional right is that it is a personal one.

And it made an admission that has not aged well, and was meant kindly. That there exists a serious and difficult problem arising from a feeling of race hostility which the law is powerless to control may be freely admitted.

But its solution cannot be promoted by depriving citizens of their constitutional rights and privileges.

There is one sentence in the opinion where the Court simply points at the ordinance and lets it speak.

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Detroit Publishing Co., c. 1906 · Library of Congress · AI-colorized. View the original.

The city had said the law was needed to keep the races pure.

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Detroit Publishing Co., c. 1906 · Library of Congress · AI-colorized. View the original.

The Court noted, without further comment, that the same ordinance permitted the employment of Black servants in white families.

The right the ordinance annulled, it held, was the civil right of a white man to dispose of his property if he saw fit to a person of colour, and of a Black person to make such a disposition to a white person.

The public peace was urged. Desirable as that is, the Court said, it cannot be accomplished by ordinances which deny rights protected by the Federal Constitution.

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Detroit Publishing Co., c. 1906 · Library of Congress · AI-colorized. View the original.

The judgment of the Court of Appeals of Kentucky was reversed on the fifth of November, nineteen seventeen.

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Detroit Publishing Co., c. 1906 · Library of Congress · AI-colorized. View the original.

Look again at why the ordinance failed, and you can see the shape of what comes next. It failed because it was a law, and because it stopped an owner from selling.

Nine years later the Court took a case from Washington, D.C., about a different instrument. Not an ordinance. A clause written into a deed by the owners themselves.

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Detroit Publishing Co., c. 1890-1910 · Library of Congress · AI-colorized. View the original.

Private lot owners in the District of Columbia had signed mutual covenants, running twenty-one years, not to sell to any person of Negro blood or race. One of them then sold to a Black buyer.

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Detroit Publishing Co., c. 1900-1910 · Library of Congress · AI-colorized. View the original.

This time the Court was asked to strike that covenant down.

It refused, and it did not think the question was close.

The Fourteenth Amendment and the Civil Rights Acts, it said, do not in any manner prohibit or invalidate contracts entered into by private individuals in respect to the control and disposition of their own property.

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Detroit Publishing Co., c. 1900-1910 · Library of Congress · AI-colorized. View the original.

The same principle that had killed the ordinance now protected the covenant. What a city could not do by law, its residents could do by signature.

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Detroit Publishing Co., c. 1906 · Library of Congress · AI-colorized. View the original.

Covenants spread through American subdivisions for the next twenty years, and courts enforced them.

The Supreme Court did not stop that until nineteen forty-eight, in Shelley against Kraemer — and even then it did not void the covenants. It held that a state court granting judicial enforcement of one denied the equal protection of the laws.

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Detroit Publishing Co., c. 1910-1920 · Library of Congress · AI-colorized. View the original.

The ordinance was on the books for three and a half years and, so far as this record shows, was never enforced against anyone but a buyer who wanted to be stopped.

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Detroit Publishing Co., c. 1906 · Library of Congress · AI-colorized. View the original.

That block is still there. Everything you have seen is four reported cases and one city ordinance, all free online, and the citations are in the description. If you read one, read the ordinance — it is the only document here that says what it wants.