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345 In October 1914, Charles Buchanan, a white real estate agent, and William Warley, an African American postal employee, began a real estate transaction that would end at the Supreme Court of the United States. On May 11 of that year, the city of Louisville, Kentucky, located on the Ohio River, the historic border between North and South, enacted an ordinance that prohibited white property owners from selling to African Americans if the property was located in a white neighborhood. Black leaders quickly mobilized to fight what they viewed as an assault on their equal protection and property rights. With the assistance of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (naacp), the city’s black leadership organized a local branch and formulated a legal strategy, finding a white property owner who would sell to an African American family, setting the stage for a test case of the residential segregation law. This case, Buchanan v. Warley, made it to the U.S. Supreme Court, which in 1917 unanimously struck down Louisville’s ordinance as unconstitutional because it violated the rights of both blacks and whites to dispose of their property. Furthermore , it directly violated the Fourteenth Amendment’s prohibition of interference with property rights except by due process of law. This essay reconsiders Buchanan both in terms of its importance in American property law and of its impact on the southern law of segregation. It also analyzes the multiple meanings of this decision—its impact on the legal geography of race in one southern city, its value as a mobilizing force for black activists, and its significance as legal precedent. By examining local records of Louisville’s black leaders, newspapers, national naacp correspondence, and the case files from the lower federal and Supreme Courts, this essay takes a Race, Property, and Negotiated Space in the American South A Reconsideration of Buchanan v. Warley Patricia Hagler Minter 346 Patricia Hagler Minter fresh look at what historians have traditionally viewed as a stepping-stone to dismantling legalized racial separation in America. Long interpreted merely as one phase of the march toward Brown, Buchanan received renewed interest from legal scholars starting in the 1980s. Benno Schmidt’s pathbreaking 1982 article on the Supreme Court and race in the Progressive Era remains the starting point for scholars, and George Wright’s 1985 study of Louisville’s African American community provides valuable information about race and class formation in a New South border city. Later, David Delaney’s Race, Place, and the Law utilized law and society methodology to show how segregationists used law to create “geographies of power.” Michael Klarman and David E. Bernstein examined the Buchanan decision in a 1998 Vanderbilt Law Review forum. Introducing the colloquium, James Ely Jr. mused about why the decision has not garnered more attention from scholars, suggesting that “possibly, the dual nature of Buchanan has made it difficult for scholars to assess.” The spirited discussion between Klarman and Bernstein speaks to that duality—that “Buchanan represents both the resolute defense of property owners’ rights against regulation and the most significant judicial victory for civil rights during the early decades of the twentieth century.” Klarman contextualized several Progressive Era decisions involving race, arguing that because the U.S. Supreme Court invalidated residential segregation in Buchanan on substantive due process instead of equal protection grounds, its value as a civil rights precedent is dubious at best, a conclusion he amplified in his major study, From Jim Crow to Civil Rights (2004). In contrast, Bernstein argued that the naacp owes its victory in Buchanan to the Court’s Lochner-era individual-rights jurisprudence , which laid the groundwork for racial egalitarianism grounded in the laissez-faire tradition, a libertarian thesis that he applied to labor regulation in other contexts, most recently in his attempts to rehabilitate Lochner and freedom of contract theory into precedents and doctrines that ultimately guarded, not destroyed, individual rights. The work of Susan Carle has also shed light on the naacp’s legal strategies from 1910 to 1920, as has Risa L. Goluboff’s study of civil rights lawyering in the pre-Brown world in which the meaning of civil rights was up for grabs, providing a new way to look at Buchanan and other “test cases.” This essay accepts these calls to reevaluate this decision and attempts to place Buchanan in its legal-cultural context and to explain why this decision is important even though it does not fit the traditional narrative about civil rights...

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