Unjust Deeds: The Restrictive Covenant Cases and the Making of the Civil Rights Movement

Justice, Power, and Politics

by Jeffrey D. Gonda

In 1945, six African American families from St. Louis, Detroit, and Washington, D.C., began a desperate fight to keep their homes. Each of them had purchased a property that prohibited the occupancy of African Americans and other minority groups through the use of legal instruments called racial restrictive covenants--one of the most pervasive tools of residential segregation in the aftermath of World War II. Over the next three years, local activists and lawyers at the NAACP fought through the nation's courts to end the enforcement of these discriminatory contracts.

Unjust Deeds explores the origins and complex legacies of their dramatic campaign, culminating in a landmark Supreme Court victory in Shelley v. Kraemer (1948). Restoring this story to its proper place in the history of the black freedom struggle, Jeffrey D. Gonda's groundbreaking study provides a critical vantage point to the simultaneously personal, local, and national dimensions of legal activism in the twentieth century and offers a new understanding of the evolving legal fight against Jim Crow in neighborhoods and courtrooms across America.

312 pages, Hardcover

First published August 26, 2015

Reviews

[John NM · Rating 4 out of 5]

Focuses a lot on the details of how the cases worked their way to the Supreme court, including the legal strategies employed and interesting roles played by institutions like the NAACP. Very interesting and important history, and the book did a reasonably good job of showing how these cases influenced the larger civil rights movement with the developing emphasis on challenges to de jure discrimination.

Ultimately, it's an interesting stepping stone into understanding why the eradication of tools like racial covenants did not result in the eradication of urban segregation. Here we see the belief that these covenants were the barrier to equity in housing and the actions that belief inspired. It's disheartening to see how disappointing the results have been, but there are broader lessons in general to the effectiveness of litigation in dealing with the social ill of racism.

[David Lucander · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent book that could have easily been a basic "courtroom drama," but the author skillfully weaves the story of a landmark Supreme Court case into a broader context of the Great Migration and the post-war germination of the Civil Rights Movement.

In the vein of The Courage of Their Convictions, Unjust Deeds is legal history with a profoundly personal touch. By focusing on the lives of African American homeowners and local activist-lawyers, the author subtly reminds us that people are the ones who make history happen.

Chapters one and two are the outgrowth of an award winning article from the Journal of Supreme Court History, the author received an award from the late Justice Scalia for his efforts. To me, these are the best developed sections - but I'm primarily interested in African American history. The other chapters delve into federal politics and case law, so my reading bogged down there but others with different interests might find these sections exciting.

I would have liked to see more balance on the pro-covenant side. There are sections on white homeowners and lawyers, but those parts are comparatively brief. An epilogue that looked at the communities in question post-Shelley would have been revealing. Did those neighborhoods change following the ruling, and if so, in what ways? Maybe this stuff is beyond the book's purview and it's just a rumination for future research that another writer will pick up.