January 15, 1948

At 8:30 on the morning of January 15, 1948, Mrs. Andrew Ransom, wife of the head of the Legal Defense division of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), entered the marble corridors of the Supreme Court building. Pulling her crochet project from her handbag, she took up a position outside the door to the main courtroom.

Two hours later, 25 more people had joined her and the numbers grew until one hundred, mostly African Americans waited in line. By noon, twenty were admitted to public seating within the courtroom when the nine justices of the Supreme Court took their places to hear arguments on the constitutionality of racially restrictive housing covenants. According to the Baltimore Afro-American newspaper, “The hopes and fears of some 14 million colored Americans hung in the balance.” ¹

In the press section, white newspapermen were outnumbered for this case by reporters of colored weeklies.

In the audience was Walter White, elbows on knees, his chin resting on his hands. The NAACP and many another organization had worked and planned this fight for 30 years. This was the DAY.

It was the day in court for all minority peoples in a free America. They came to the highest court in the land asking it to live up to the words, “Equal Justice Under the Law” carved over its portico.²

Four cases before the Supreme Court challenged the constitutionality of court enforcement of private agreements excluding African Americans, Jews, Asians and other racial minorities from home ownership and occupancy in specified residential areas. These cases were the result of national tactics formulated in 1945 by the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund under the aegis of Charles Hamilton Houston, the architect of civil rights law often identified as “the man who killed Jim Crow.”

Originating in St. Louis and Detroit, the cases of Shelley v. Kraemer and McGhee v. Sipes tested state enforcement of racial covenants. The remaining two cases, Hurd v. Hodge and Urciolo v. Hodge, originated in the District of Columbia and, therefore, tested federal enforcement.

Washington, D.C. in the 1940s

Post-World War II Washington, D.C., reflected the city's historical paradigm of racial bipolarity. A rigid system of racial segregation defined the framework for politics, economics and social interaction. “In Washington, [color] is the first basis by which is determined the most important decisions of a man's life—where he shall live, where he shall work and at what pay, where he shall go to school and church, and how he shall be judged in his community.³