Unjust Deeds explores the history of an often overlooked civil rights milestone: the landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision in Shelley v. Kraemer (1948). In a group of cases from St. Louis, Detroit, and Washington, D.C., six African American families challenged the hardening boundaries of the nation’s racial ghettos as they fought desperately to hold onto their homes. Aided by the NAACP and local civil rights attorneys, they attacked the legal legitimacy of racial restrictive covenants, one of the most pervasive instruments of residential segregation in the 1940s. Their dramatic campaign culmina ... More

Unjust Deeds explores the history of an often overlooked civil rights milestone: the landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision in Shelley v. Kraemer (1948). In a group of cases from St. Louis, Detroit, and Washington, D.C., six African American families challenged the hardening boundaries of the nation’s racial ghettos as they fought desperately to hold onto their homes. Aided by the NAACP and local civil rights attorneys, they attacked the legal legitimacy of racial restrictive covenants, one of the most pervasive instruments of residential segregation in the 1940s. Their dramatic campaign culminated in a unanimous Supreme Court victory that left the struggle for justice under the law forever transformed. Unjust Deeds explores the origins and complex legacies of the covenant cases and reveals how the campaign against housing discrimination—in both its successes and failures—helped to reshape the postwar nation. Providing a critical vantage point to witness the simultaneously personal, local, and national dimensions of legal change in the twentieth century, this book ultimately offers a new understanding of the evolving legal fight against Jim Crow and the making of the civil rights movement in neighborhoods and courtrooms across America.