A House With a Yard

During World War II, tall, stringy J. D. Shelley made good money as a construction worker. His wife Ethel Lee had a job as a maid. Like many other Negro families, the Shelleys scraped and pinched to get every possible nickel into the bank. They had six children. They lived in a savage St. Louis slum, and they ached for quiet, decency and a home of their own.

They finally found it--a two-story house of rust-colored brick on the border between white and Negro districts in midSt. Louis. The place was 50 years old, but it had a lawn and stood on a quiet, elm-shaded street. They made a down payment, signed a mortgage and moved in one day in October 1945. That evening a process server notified them that they had been sued by a white neighbor. The neighbor wanted to throw them out.

Then the Shelleys discovered that their house was covered by a restrictive real-estate covenant which a "neighborhood improvement association" had drawn up in 1911. It prohibited any owner from selling it to a Negro.

The Shelleys were not surprised. Like every Negro, like Jews, Chinese, Mexicans and those of many another racial group in the U.S., they had lived their lives behind opaque, flint-hard walls of prejudice. But they could not bear the idea of going back to the noisome streets they had left behind. They went to their minister and asked for help.

They got it. A Negro attorney agreed to represent them. Their church, Negro real-estate dealers and the American Civil Liberties Union contributed money. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People incorporated their case into a pool of similar cases from all over the nation. With mingled hope, doubt and embarrassment, the Shelleys suddenly found themselves one of the spearheads of a great legal battle.

They won their case in St. Louis' circuit court, but the Missouri supreme court reversed the decision. Finally the Shelleys' case went to the Supreme Court of the United States, to be considered with those of two other families from Washington, D.C. and Detroit.

Last week Chief Justice Vinson delivered the opinion of the court. Its essence: restrictive real-estate covenants are lawful--as private agreements--but under the terms of the 14th Amendment and the Civil Rights Act of 1866 they cannot be enforced by either state or federal courts. Without doubt, this was a momentous decision in U.S. judicial history. It would set off no violent upheaval in the pattern of city life. But it removed one of the weapons by which segregation is enforced, and would give the Negro an increasingly better chance to make a decent life for himself.

Said Mrs. Shelley, when she heard that she could keep her house: "My little soul is overjoyed. Wait till I get by myself. I'll tell the Lord of my thankfulness."

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