HOME

It was just a little house, a simple, nondescript, two-story, brick rowhome located in a simple, nondescript neighborhood in St. Louis, Missouri.1 It could house two families—one on the top floor and one on the bottom—just four little rooms on each floor.2 But for J.D. and Ethel, that little house on Labadie Street was everything.

They married when they were quite young. J.D. was a laborer, working in construction, at the local sawmill, for the railroad—any job necessary to provide for Ethel and their rapidly growing family.3 But then, reality hit way too close to home. A young, African-American girl was brutally flogged by a group of white men. The girl was a friend. J.D. and Ethel were African-American. It was 1929 in Starkville, Mississippi.4 J.D. and Ethel knew they had to move to keep their family of six small children safe.

So, J.D. headed to St. Louis to look for work and a place for his young family to live. He found work—making about $17 a week—but housing was a harder problem to solve.5 At the time, the city was highly segregated. In 1916, the city passed an ordinance which prohibited a person from moving to any city block where 75% of the residents were of another race.6 That ordinance was enjoined, so property owners took another route: neighborhood-wide restrictive covenants.7 By the 1930’s, 373 neighborhoods, comprising 559 city blocks were subject to restrictive covenants similar to the following:

The said property is hereby restricted to the use and occupancy for the term of Fifty (50) years from this date, so that it shall be a condition all the time and whether recited and referred to as (sic) not in subsequent conveyances and shall attach to the land, as a condition precedent to the sale of the same, that hereafter no part of said property or any portion thereof shall be, for said term of Fifty-years, occupied by any person not of the Caucasian race, it being intended hereby to restrict the use of said property for said period of time against the occupancy as owners or tenants of any portion of said property for resident or other purpose by people of the Negro or Mongolian Race.8

These restrictive covenants often covered neighborhoods that bordered areas with predominately African-American residents. Thus, these restrictive covenants effectively kept the African American population of the city crowded into small neighborhoods with little hope of finding housing elsewhere.9 But, J.D. and Ethel didn’t forfeit their dream. They rented apartments, worked multiple jobs, and saved for fifteen years to scrape together $5,700.10 It was just enough to buy the house on Labadie Street, and that is exactly what they did.11

On August 11, 1945, they signed the deed and moved their children into the first place they could truly call home. On October 9, 1945, a process server appeared at their home, and they learned they had been sued.12 A homeowner sued to enforce the restrictive covenant quoted above. Although the restrictive covenant was signed and recorded in 1911, no one told J.D. and Ethel when they bought the house. They did not plan to challenge discriminatory housing practices, but they were not about to leave their little home just because they had been sued.13

When Monroe and Josephine Vaughn’s son was born, the outlook was bleak.14 They were living in Columbus, Kentucky, and although both no longer were enslaved, life was still very hard for the young African American family.15 But, they found a way to send young George to school, and then to Lane College in Jackson, Tennessee.16 Once he graduated, he enrolled in Walden University, the first African-American law school in the South.17

By 1905, he was admitted to the St. Louis Bar, but then took a brief, career detour to serve in an artillery unit during World War I.18 By October 9, 1945, George L. Vaughn was fifty years old and well-known as a good lawyer in the St. Louis area.19 When the St. Louis AfricanAmerican Real Estate Broker’s Association approached him about representing J.D. and Ethel, it likely was his most high-profile case yet, but he took it anyways.20

Initially, they won. The trial court held that the restrictive covenant was never effective because it was never signed by all property owners in the covered area.21 The Missouri Supreme Court disagreed. It held that the restrictive covenant was effective and that it did not violate any constitutional right guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment.22 Why? Because the people who signed and recorded the restrictive covenant weren’t state actors. In other words, the restrictive covenant was “just” an agreement between private parties, so it didn’t implicate the Fourteenth Amendment.23

George had to find a way around that argument. He appealed the case to the U.S. Supreme Court, and it was consolidated with two other cases raising similar challenges to race-based restrictive covenants.24 Although the other were backed by the NAACP (Thurgood Marshall argued one of them), J.D. and Ethel’s case was not. Certainly, everyone was professional but, “Vaughn was regarded as lacking proper sophistication and skill successfully to handle the intricate legal complexities of the problem.”25 George, J.D., and Ethel received little financial support from the NAACP or any other national organizations that had taken interest in these cases, yet they persevered.26

More importantly, George found a way around the homeowners’ argument that prevailed before the Missouri Supreme Court. The Fourteenth Amendment did not reach private conduct, but it does govern state actions through its courts.27 The Supreme Court agreed.

We hold that in granting judicial enforcement of the restrictive agreements in these cases, the States have denied petitioners the equal protection of the laws and that, therefore, the action of the state courts cannot stand. We have noted that freedom from discrimination by the States in the enjoyment of property rights was among the basic objectives sought to be effectuated by the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment. That such discrimination has occurred in these cases is clear. Because of the race or color of these petitioners they have been denied rights of ownership or occupancy enjoyed as a matter of course by other citizens of different race or color.28

Just like that, on May 4, 1948, the judgment of the Supreme Court of Missouri was reversed, and other states had no choice but to take notice that their discriminatory restrictive covenants could not be enforced without running afoul of the Fourteenth Amendment.29

J.D. and Ethel Shelley finished raising their family in that house, living there for another 13 years, until 1961—the year the restrictive covenant was supposed to expire.30 Then they sold it and moved to another home nearby.31 Attorney George L. Vaughn died a little over a year after the Supreme Court ruling,32 but the impact of his simple act of helping a couple retain their simple house remains to this day.

1 National Park Service, Missouri: The Shelley House, https://www.nps.gov/places/ missouri-the-shelley-house-l.htm, last visited May 6, 2023.

2 National Park Service, National Register of Historic Places Registration Form 10900, The Shelley House, available at https://npgallery.nps.gov/NRHP/GetAsset/ continued on page 24

By: Joe Jarret, J.D., Ph.D. Attorney, University of Tennessee