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Advances were made in the courts in areas other than public education. In many neighborhoods in northern cities, which technically were not segregated, residents were required to sign restrictive real estate covenants promising that if they moved, they would not sell their houses to African Americans and sometimes not to Chinese, Japanese, Mexicans, Filipinos, Jews, and other ethnic minorities as well.
Robert M. Fogelson. 2005.
Bourgeois Nightmares: Suburbia, 1870–1930 . New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 102–103. In the case of
Shelley v. Kraemer (1948), the Supreme Court held that while such covenants did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment because they consisted of agreements between private citizens, their provisions could not be enforced by courts.
Shelley v. Kraemer , 334 U.S. 1 (1948). Because state courts are government institutions and the Fourteenth Amendment prohibits the government from denying people equal protection of the law, the courts’ enforcement of such covenants would be a violation of the amendment. Thus, if a white family chose to sell its house to a black family and the other homeowners in the neighborhood tried to sue the seller, the court would not hear the case. In 1967, the Supreme Court struck down a Virginia law that prohibited interracial marriage in
Loving v. Virginia .
Loving v. Virginia , 388 U.S. 1 (1967).
Beyond these favorable court rulings, however, progress toward equality for African Americans remained slow in the 1950s. In 1962, Congress proposed what later became the
Twenty-Fourth Amendment , which banned the poll tax in elections to federal (but not state or local) office; the amendment went into effect after being ratified in early 1964. Several southern states continued to require residents to pay poll taxes in order to vote in state elections until 1966 when, in the case of
Harper v. Virginia Board of Elections , the Supreme Court declared that requiring payment of a poll tax in order to vote in an election at any level was unconstitutional.
Harper v. Virginia Board of Elections , 383 U.S. 663 (1966).
The slow rate of progress led to frustration within the African American community. Newer, grassroots organizations such as the
Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC),
Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), and
Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) challenged the NAACP’s position as the leading civil rights organization and questioned its legal-focused strategy. These newer groups tended to prefer more confrontational approaches, including the use of
direct action campaigns relying on marches and demonstrations. The strategies of nonviolent resistance and
civil disobedience , or the refusal to obey an unjust law, had been effective in the campaign led by Mahatma
Gandhi to liberate colonial India from British rule in the 1930s and 1940s. Civil rights pioneers adopted these measures in the 1955–1956 Montgomery bus boycott. After Rosa
Parks refused to give up her bus seat to a white person and was arrested, a group of black women carried out a day-long boycott of Montgomery’s public transit system. This boycott was then extended for over a year and overseen by union organizer E. D. Nixon. The effort desegregated public transportation in that city.
“Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand (1869–1948),” http://kingencyclopedia.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/encyclopedia/enc_gandhi_mohandas_karamchand_1869_1948/index.html (April 10, 2016); “Nixon, E. D. (1899–1987),” http://www.blackpast.org/aah/nixon-e-d-nixon-1899-1987(April 10, 2016).
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