Read the excerpt below from the Supreme Court decision in *Buchanan v. Warley* (1917):
"The concrete question here is: May a Chinese or a person of color be prohibited from purchasing and occupying property in a block where the majority of houses are occupied by white persons...? The Fourteenth Amendment protects life, liberty, and property from invasion by State action without due process of law. Property is more than the mere thing which a person owns. It includes the right to acquire, use, and dispose of it."
Which of the following best describes how local governments and private citizens responded to the legal limitation established in the excerpt, and what this response reveals about segregation in the early twentieth century?
- AThe decision successfully dismantled residential segregation throughout the United States by legally classifying all private, customary housing discrimination as a form of unconstitutional state-enforced segregation.
- BSouthern and northern cities immediately complied by integrating neighborhoods, as the ruling established that customary, informal segregation in northern housing markets was subject to the same Fourteenth Amendment restrictions as southern state-enforced segregation laws.
- Private property owners and municipal real estate boards widely turned to racially restrictive covenants in property deeds, illustrating how private agreements were used to maintain systemic segregation when direct state-enforced zoning was ruled unconstitutional.Cevap
- DBlack agricultural workers in the rural South successfully utilized the ruling to convert their sharecropping agreements into equitable, legally protected land ownership contracts.
Cevap
The correct option stating that private property owners and real estate boards turned to racially restrictive covenants to maintain residential segregation.
The Supreme Court's ruling in *Buchanan v. Warley* (1917) declared municipal racial zoning ordinances unconstitutional because they constituted state action that violated the Fourteenth Amendment's protection of property rights. To bypass this restriction, white property owners and real estate boards turned to private racially restrictive covenants. Because the Fourteenth Amendment only prohibits discriminatory state action, these private contracts were legally enforceable for decades, demonstrating how private discrimination was used to maintain systemic residential segregation.
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Anahtar Kavram
The legal distinction between state-enforced (de jure) segregation and private or systemic (de facto) discrimination, and the historical use of private restrictive covenants to bypass constitutional protections.