Buchanan v. Warley

BUCHANAN v. WARLEY.

Error to the Court of Appeals of the State of Kentucky.

No. 33. Argued April 10, 11, 1916; restored to docket for reargument April 17, 1916; reargued April 27, 1917 — Decided November 5, 1917.

165 Kentucky, 559, reversed.

The case is stated in the opinion.

Mr. Clayton B. Blakey and Mr. Moorfield Storey, with whom Mr. Harold S. Davis was on the briefs, for plaintiff in error. Mr. Pendleton Beckley, with whom Mr. Stuart Chevalier and Mr. William P. Kimball were on the brief, for defendant in error.

The report occupies pages 60 through 82 of volume 245 of the United States Reports. The opinion of the Court, delivered by Mr. Justice Day, begins at page 69 and closes at page 82. The report records no separate opinion.

[245 U.S. 60] “A city ordinance which forbids colored persons to occupy houses in blocks where the greater number of houses are occupied by white persons, in practical effect prevents the sale of lots in such blocks to colored persons, and is unconstitutional. A white owner, who has made an otherwise valid and enforceable contract to convey such a lot to a colored person, for the erection of a house upon it for occupancy by the vendee, is deprived, in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment, of an essential element of his property, — the right to dispose of it to a constitutionally qualified purchaser, — and may attack the prohibition under the Fourteenth Amendment in a suit for specific performance of the contract against the vendee.”

[245 U.S. 60] “A city ordinance forbidding colored persons from occupying houses as residences, or places of abode or public assembly, on blocks where the majority of the houses are occupied by white persons for those purposes, and in like manner forbidding white persons when the conditions as to occupancy are reversed, and which bases the interdiction upon color and nothing more, passes the legitimate bounds of police power and invades the civil right to acquire, enjoy and use [245 U.S. 61] property, which is guaranteed in equal measure to all citizens, white or colored, by the Fourteenth Amendment.”

[245 U.S. 61] “Such a prohibition can not be sustained upon the grounds that, through race segregation, it serves to diminish miscegenation and promotes the public peace by averting race hostility and conflict, or that it prevents deterioration in value of property owned and occupied by white people; nor does the fact that upon its face it applies impartially to both races relieve it from the vice of discrimination or obviate the objection that it deprives of property without due process of law. Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U. S. 537, and Berea College Case, 211 U. S. 45, distinguished.”

[245 U.S. 61] “165 Kentucky, 559, reversed.”

[245 U.S. 69] “Buchanan, plaintiff in error, brought an action in the Chancery Branch of Jefferson Circuit Court of Kentucky for the specific performance of a contract for the sale of certain real estate situated in the City of Louisville at the corner of 37th Street and Pflanz Avenue.”

[245 U.S. 70] The Reporter records the ordinance's title: an ordinance “to prevent conflict and ill-feeling between the white and colored races in the City of Louisville, and to preserve the public peace and promote the general welfare by making reasonable provisions requiring, as far as practicable, the use of separate blocks for residences, places of abode and places of assembly by white and colored people respectively.”

[245 U.S. 72] “The objection is made that this writ of error should be dismissed because the alleged denial of constitutional rights involves only the rights of colored persons, and the plaintiff in error is a white person. This court has frequently held that while an unconstitutional act is no law, attacks upon the validity of laws can only be entertained when made by those whose rights are directly affected by the law or ordinance in question. Only such persons, it has been settled, can be heard to attack the constitutionality of the law or ordinance. But this case does not run counter to that principle.”

[245 U.S. 73] “The right of the plaintiff in error to sell his property was directly involved and necessarily impaired because it was held in effect that he could not sell the lot to a person of color who was willing and ready to acquire the property, and had obligated himself to take it. . . . In this case the property rights of the plaintiff in error are directly and necessarily involved. See Truax v. Raich, 239 U. S. 33, 38.”

[245 U.S. 74] “Property is more than the mere thing which a person owns. It is elementary that it includes the right to acquire, use, and dispose of it. The Constitution protects these essential attributes of property. Holden v. Hardy, 169 U. S. 366, 391. Property consists of the free use, enjoyment, and disposal of a person's acquisitions without control or diminution save by the law of the land. 1 Blackstone's Commentaries (Cooley's Ed.), 127.”

[245 U.S. 74] “True it is that dominion over property springing from ownership is not absolute and unqualified. The disposition and use of property may be controlled in the exercise of the police power in the interest of the public health, convenience, or welfare. Harmful occupations may be [245 U.S. 75] controlled and regulated. Legitimate business may also be regulated in the interest of the public. Certain uses of property may be confined to portions of the municipality other than the resident district, such as livery stables, brickyards and the like, because of the impairment of the health and comfort of the occupants of neighboring property. . . . [B]ut these cases do not touch the one at bar.”

[245 U.S. 75] “The concrete question here is: May the occupancy, and, necessarily, the purchase and sale of property of which occupancy is an incident, be inhibited by the States, or by one of its municipalities, solely because of the color of the proposed occupant of the premises?”

[245 U.S. 78] “In the face of these constitutional and statutory provisions, can a white man be denied, consistently with due process of law, the right to dispose of his property to a purchaser by prohibiting the occupation of it for the sole reason that the purchaser is a person of color intending to occupy the premises as a place of residence?”

[245 U.S. 81] “It is the purpose of such enactments, and, it is frankly avowed it will be their ultimate effect, to require by law, at least in residential districts, the compulsory separation of the races on account of color. . . . The case presented does not deal with an attempt to prohibit the amalgamation of the races. The right which the ordinance annulled was the civil right of a white man to dispose of his property if he saw fit to do so to a person of color and of a colored person to make such disposition to a white person.”

[245 U.S. 81] “It is urged that this proposed segregation will promote the public peace by preventing race conflicts. Desirable as this is, and important as is the preservation of the public peace, this aim cannot be accomplished by laws or ordinances which deny rights created or protected by the Federal Constitution.”

[245 U.S. 82] “We think this attempt to prevent the alienation of the property in question to a person of color was not a legitimate exercise of the police power of the State, and is in direct violation of the fundamental law enacted in the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution preventing state interference with property rights except by due process of law. That being the case the ordinance cannot stand.”

[245 U.S. 82] “Reaching this conclusion it follows that the judgment of the Kentucky Court of Appeals must be reversed, and the cause remanded to that court for further proceedings not inconsistent with this opinion.”

[245 U.S. 82] “Reversed.”

Editorial note. This record is a research edition, not a substitute for the official reporter. It reproduces the Reporter of Decisions apparatus in full and reproduces the opinion of the Court in extended verbatim excerpts, arranged under the Court's own sequence of analysis, each bracketed with the official United States Reports page on which the passage appears. Every quotation mark encloses the Court's or the Reporter's own words.

Editorial note. Three limitations are declared. First, the arguments of counsel printed at pages 61 through 69 are not reproduced. Second, the recital of the ordinance's several sections and of the record below (pages 69 through 72) is largely summarised because it reproduces municipal text and pleadings rather than the Court's analysis. Third, the Court's extensive quotations from The Slaughter House Cases, Strauder v. West Virginia, Ex parte Virginia, the Civil Rights Cases, and the Georgia Supreme Court opinion in Carey v. Atlanta (pages 76 through 80) are compressed to their doctrinal use; the sentences the Court itself contributed at pages 74 through 75 and 81 through 82 are reproduced verbatim. No substantive word has been altered, modernised, or paraphrased inside a quotation.

Editorial note. A Louisville ordinance divided the city's residential blocks by the race of the majority of their existing occupants and made it unlawful for a person of the other race to move into and occupy a residence in such a block. Buchanan, a white owner, contracted to sell a lot to Warley, a coloured purchaser, on terms making the purchaser's obligation to pay conditional on his being lawfully able to occupy the property as a residence. The block in question contained a majority of houses occupied by white persons, so the ordinance forbade the occupancy for which the contract provided.

Editorial note. Buchanan sued for specific performance in the Chancery Court; Warley pleaded the ordinance as the ground on which he could not be compelled to perform. The Court of Appeals of Kentucky sustained the ordinance and denied relief. The Supreme Court reversed on writ of error, holding the case properly presented because the seller's own right to sell was directly impaired.

Editorial note. The ordinance violated the Fourteenth Amendment by depriving the owner of property without due process of law. The right to acquire, use, and dispose of property is a right protected against state abridgment, and an ordinance that forbids an owner to sell to a purchaser solely because of the purchaser's colour destroys an essential incident of ownership. The rule derived is that a State may not, in the name of the police power, allocate residential occupancy by race; the interests advanced in support of such a measure cannot justify the direct annihilation of the power of disposition.

Editorial note. Mr. Justice Day accepted that the police power is broad and that the Court had upheld many severe restrictions on the use of land, but reasoned that this ordinance operated not upon the use of property in relation to its neighbours but upon the identity of the person permitted to occupy it. He treated the case as controlled by the settled understanding that property in a thing consists of the unrestricted right of use, enjoyment, and disposal. The asserted justifications — the preservation of public peace, the prevention of racial conflict, and the maintenance of property values — were held insufficient, since the ordinance's operation was to deny to one class of citizens a civil right expressly secured by the Amendment and by the enforcement legislation Congress had enacted under it.

Editorial note. Buchanan places a constitutional boundary around the police power at the moment American cities were beginning to district land, and it does so on a property rationale rather than a rationale of equal citizenship: the ordinance failed because it destroyed the owner's power of alienation. That reasoning explains what followed. Because state ordinances were foreclosed, exclusion moved into privately drafted covenants, which the Court initially declined to reach as state action in Corrigan v. Buckley, 271 U.S. 323 (1926), and finally addressed in Shelley v. Kraemer, 334 U.S. 1 (1948). The decision is therefore the first term in the treatise's account of residential segregation and of the constitutional limits on land-use regulation.

Editorial note. Followed and applied. The Court has consistently adhered to Buchanan in striking down racial occupancy restrictions imposed by law, and Shelley v. Kraemer, 334 U.S. 1 (1948), and Barrows v. Jackson, 346 U.S. 249 (1953), completed the analysis by denying judicial enforcement, at equity and at law, to privately drafted racial covenants.

Editorial note. Read with U.S. Const. amend. XIV, § 1, and the treatise chapters on fair housing and civil rights and on zoning and the police power.