Abstract of Dissertation
 
    "Deeds of Mistrust: Race, Housing and Restrictive Covenants in
                         Chicago, 1900-1953"
 
This dissertation will examine the Chicago area's history of racial
restrictive covenants -- neighborhood agreements against selling or
renting housing to African-Americans and other racial and ethnic
minorities. The earliest use of racial and ethnic restrictions in
Chicago and its suburbs occurred around the turn-of-the-century in
individual buildings and new subdivisions. Areas in Rogers Park,
Ravenswood, Highland Park, and Kenilworth were limited to ownership and
occupancy by "Caucasians only" -- and in some instances, by Christian
Caucasians.
 
Beginning in the late 1920s, racial restrictive covenants were adopted
by entire sections of white neighborhoods to the east and the south of
the Black Belt, and in other areas of Chicago. Neighborhood improvement
associations and real estate organizations led the covenant campaigns,
and were enthusiastically supported by mainstream organizations such as
YMCAs, churches, women's clubs, and PTAs. As august an institution as
the University of Chicago lent covert assistance in the form of
financial and legal resources to the covenant campaigns in the Woodlawn
and Washington Park areas, although its support was well enough known
that one landlord who turned away an African-American family told them
that the university would not allow him to rent to them.
 
During the Depression, the enthusiasm for racial restrictive covenants
cooled, although Washington Park's business association renewed its
efforts to exclude African-Americans using covenants. At the same time,
African-Americans started to challenge the covenants individually and
as a movement. Financed by institutions such as the Supreme Liberty
Life Insurance Company and often using white "fronts," African-American
families acquired covenanted properties. Covenanters in some
neighborhoods found themselves unable to afford the legal costs of
challenging the covenant violations in court, although others bragged
that they had evicted every African-American who had moved in.
 
In 1937, a greater challenge to covenants was offered when Carl
Hansberry, an African-American Republican, real estate developer, and
NAACP official acquired a house in the Washington Park area for his
family, including his 2 year old daughter Lorraine whose 1959 "Raisin
in the Sun" memorialized the hostility of the white neighbors.
Hansberry and the civil rights foundation he created carried the case
through the county and Illinois State Supreme Courts, which ruled in
favor of his expulsion, to the U.S. Supreme Court. The case became a
"cause celebre" for the national NAACP, and local and national NAACP
lawyers were assigned to the case. In 1940, in a disappointing victory
for the NAACP, the Court ruled in favor of Hansberry on a technicality,
leaving the constitutionality of racial restrictive covenants
unassailed.
 
Counteracting the slacking off of covenant campaigns in the city was
the Federal Housing Administration (FHA)'s endorsement of racial
restrictive covenants in properties it insured across the nation, often
on the outskirts of the city and in its suburbs. Critics of the FHA
later argued that the national scope of the New Deal agency was
responsible for the spread of covenants, especially in the suburban
milieu that was so difficult for African-Americans to integrate.
 
In the 1940s, with the accelerating migration of African-Americans to
Chicago and the decreasing availability of housing, campaigns for and
against covenants in Chicago intensified. Covenants were adopted anew
in the city's existing neighborhoods, and court challenges of violators
increased. Two bills were introduced into the Illinois state
legislature prohibiting covenants, and both were defeated due to the
intense campaign by the real estate community. At the same time, an
emerging multi-racial civil rights coalition attacked covenants
successfully on a variety of fronts. The fledgling Conference of Racial
Equality (CORE) in Hyde Park chose among its first issues the
University of Chicago's support of covenants, and the American Council
on Race Relations in Chicago published anti-covenant pamphlets.
African-American poet Langston Hughes, a columnist for the CHICAGO
DEFENDER, penned a poem titled "Restrictive Covenants" that was set in
Chicago. A municipal judge announced he would no longer enforce
covenants, and one of the most enthusiastic covenant organizations
announced it would cease using them. The Chicago NAACP shaped a new
strategy of spelling out the socio-economic consequences of covenants
in its court cases, an approach used in the Illinois Supreme Court case
of Tovey v. Levy and the U.S. Supreme Court case Shelley v.  Kraemer.
In AN AMERICAN DILEMMA, Gunnar Myrdal enthusiastically claimed that if
the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against covenants, racial segregation
would almost end in the U.S. In 1948, when the U.S. Supreme Court
ruled against the constitutionality of covenant enforcement by any
court, the African-American families who had moved into covenanted
properties in Chicago were freed from the threat of eviction.
 
This dissertation will synthesize and add to the information available
on Chicago's covenant history, which is scattered across accounts from
the 1930s through the present, and is conflicting and incomplete on a
variety of issues.  Additional information on the extent and location
of covenants in Chicago and its suburbs, the covenant campaigns, the
individual and institutional challenges to covenants by
African-Americans, and the enforcement -- or lack of enforcement -- in
Chicago courts will be examined to offer a more accurate portrait of
this state-supported system of discrimination in the Chicago area in
the first half of the twentieth century.
 
(30 January 1998)