Shelley v. Kraemer

The Shelley v. Kraemer case takes place in St. Louis, Missouri in the late 1940s. Lewis Place is a neighborhood in St. Louis and is known as the oldest African American private street in St. Louis, but it has not always been that way. Lewis Place was located in a community where St. Louis University, Washington University, and Ranken Technical College were all within a three mile radius. This became the back drop of the case in 1948. Homes in the Lewis Place neighborhood were built between 1890 and 1928 and were developed, as well as privately owned, by William J. Lewis. From 1910 to 1945, restrictive covenants, agreements between white home owners to exclude the sale of their homes to black buyers, banned African Americans from buying homes in Lewis Place. A group of African Americans led by attorney, Robert Whiterspoon, fought to put an end too restrictive covenants. They did this by persuading fair-skinned blacks who were able to pass for whites to buy several homes in Lewis Place. Once this was done, the beeds were then transferred to the actual buyers of the properties who wanted to knock down the restrictive covenants. On May 3, 1948, the Supreme Court decided to end restrictive covenants across the U.S. After the case, blacks slowly began to gain the right to purchase homes in the neighborhood of their choice.