Unjust Deeds: The Restrictive Covenant Cases and the Making of the Civil Rights Movement by Jeffrey D. Gonda (review)

In Unjust Deeds: The Restrictive Covenant Cases and the Making of the Civil Rights Movement, Jeffrey D. Gonda argues that because the story of Shelley v. Kraemer (1948) has remained largely untold, the significant contributions of anticovenant lawyers to the civil rights movement have been overlooked. When the Supreme Court declared restrictive covenants unenforceable in deciding the Shelley case, the decision raised hopes that the nation’s ghettos would be dismantled. But the considerable anticipation created by the decision was soon dashed by the reality of growing residential segregation. As a result, most scholars treat the case as irrelevant both because restrictive covenants were already failing and because the case did little to change the realities of the ghetto. Unjust Deeds restores Shelley to its rightful place in civil rights history by showing that the tactics developed by the NAACP and its allies during the anticovenant campaign were used in other civil rights battles to come, most importantly in the effort to overturn Plessy v. Ferguson (1896).

Using court documents, newspapers, the published and unpublished papers of participants, and the extensive papers of the NAACP, Gonda persuasively argues that “[t]he unfolding battle for housing access and integration transformed black legal activism” (p. 2). Perhaps the most important new strategy that the NAACP legal team adopted was the use of social science research to support its legal arguments. The resulting Brandeis briefs, named after Louis Brandeis, the Supreme Court justice who pioneered the use of social scientific scholarship to inform legal arguments, painted a bleak picture of conditions in the ghetto and pushed judges to consider their involvement in forcing black residents to live in the overcrowded and deteriorating conditions. The legal team also built an extensive network of civil rights organizations and other progressive groups willing to write amicus curiae briefs, and they forged “an enduring and powerful partnership” with the Department of Justice, setting a precedent that would soon be followed in Brown v. Board of Education (1954) (p. 210).

The five chapters of Unjust Deeds are rich and highly readable. The first two explore the use of covenants during the 1940s, mostly outside the South, and examine the local court cases that fed into Shelley v. Kraemer. The next two chapters analyze the leadership role played by the NAACP in building a lasting coalition of allies, including the Justice Department. The final chapter explores the relationship between the anticovenant campaign and the civil rights struggles that followed.

While Gonda presents a compelling argument that Shelley allowed civil rights activists to perfect the use of legal briefs to win cases, its is less clear to what extent the anticovenant campaign accomplished a meaningful goal in its own right. Gonda challenges historians who have argued that by the time Shelley was decided, covenants had already failed to hold back expanding ghettos in the face of increased migration from the South. But prior historians were differentiating between those covenants that protected properties in transitional areas from those protecting large suburban developments on the outskirts of the city, where property owners did not need the courts to enforce racial restrictions. It was only property owners in transitional areas who used the courts to maintain their shrinking white enclaves once the white housing market had effectively abandoned them, with or without Shelley.

Regardless, Gonda rightfully resurrects the anticovenant cases by skillfully connecting the issue of housing and schooling through Shelley and Brown. Although more celebrated than Shelley, Brown was no more effective at ending school segregation, largely because the two forms of segregation reinforced one another. Gonda’s valuable contribution underscores the formidable movement to counter housing discrimination, an area of research long neglected. Most studies on the expansion of residential segregation have focused on state actors rather than on the activists themselves, even though...