Caseflicks

Supreme Court of the United States • 1968

Jones v. Alfred H. Mayer Co.

392 U.S. 409 | 88 S. Ct. 2186 | 20 L. Ed. 2d 1189 | 1968 U.S. LEXIS 2980 | 47 Ohio Op. 2d 43

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Takeaway

In short, this case revived § 1982 as a powerful federal ban on private racial discrimination in property transactions and confirmed that Congress may use the Thirteenth Amendment to eliminate slavery's badges and incidents.

Background

Joseph Lee Jones and his wife alleged that Alfred H. Mayer Co. refused to sell them a home in the Paddock Woods development in St. Louis County solely because Jones was Black. They sought injunctive and other relief, relying in part on 42 U.S.C. § 1982, which guarantees citizens the same property rights enjoyed by white citizens.

The federal district court dismissed the complaint. The Eighth Circuit affirmed, reasoning that § 1982 reached only state action and therefore did not prohibit a private developer's refusal to sell. The Supreme Court granted certiorari and reversed.

Issues

Issue #1

Whether 42 U.S.C. § 1982 prohibits private racial discrimination in the sale or rental of property, or instead reaches only discrimination supported by state action.

Holding

Yes. Section 1982 bars all racial discrimination, public and private, in the sale or rental of real and personal property.

Reasoning

The statutory text gives all citizens the same right as white citizens to purchase and lease property. A private owner who puts property on the market for whites only denies Black citizens the same purchasing and leasing rights that white citizens enjoy. Nothing in that language confines the prohibition to official conduct.

The Court distinguished Hurd v. Hodge, which had invalidated judicial enforcement of a racially restrictive covenant under § 1982. Although Hurd involved government enforcement and therefore did not resolve the purely private-discrimination question, it recognized that denying a Black purchaser a chosen home because of race is the precise injury § 1982 addresses. Earlier statements suggesting a state-action limitation were dicta rather than holdings on the question presented here.

The statute originated in § 1 of the Civil Rights Act of 1866. Its broad language guaranteed equal property rights notwithstanding race, and the Reconstruction Congress understood that those rights could be impaired by private prejudice and custom as well as by discriminatory statutes such as the Black Codes.

The Act's structure reinforced that reading. Section 1 created broad substantive rights, while § 2 imposed criminal penalties only on persons acting under color of law. The limitation on criminal punishment did not limit the underlying civil right; otherwise, there would have been no reason to distinguish private violations from official violations for purposes of criminal sanctions.

Congress reenacted the 1866 Act in 1870 without narrowing it. The Court refused to infer an unstated exclusion of private discrimination, especially when Congress's attention by then had shifted toward private violence and organized racial oppression, including conduct by the Ku Klux Klan.

Issue #2

Whether Congress had constitutional authority under the Thirteenth Amendment to apply § 1982 to private racial discrimination in property transactions.

Holding

Yes. Section 1982 is valid legislation enforcing the Thirteenth Amendment because Congress may eliminate the badges and incidents of slavery, including racial barriers to acquiring property.

Reasoning

The Thirteenth Amendment is not limited to invalidating state laws that establish slavery. It abolishes slavery and involuntary servitude throughout the Nation, and its Enforcement Clause permits Congress to enact direct legislation regulating private conduct when appropriate to secure that freedom.

Congress may rationally identify and eliminate the badges and incidents of slavery. The Court's earlier decisions recognized that slavery's burdens and disabilities included the denial of fundamental civil rights, especially the equal right to inherit, purchase, lease, sell, hold, and convey property.

The Black Codes restricted formerly enslaved people from exercising property rights and thus operated as substitutes for slavery. Racial exclusion from housing and property markets likewise perpetuates a relic of slavery when it makes a person's ability to buy property depend on skin color and confines Black citizens to segregated communities.

The Court concluded that the freedom protected by the Thirteenth Amendment necessarily includes the practical freedom to buy what white citizens can buy and live where white citizens can live. Section 1982 was therefore an appropriate means of enforcing the Amendment. To the extent Hodges v. United States adopted a narrower view of congressional power under the Thirteenth Amendment, the Court overruled it.

Issue #3

Whether the recently enacted Fair Housing Title of the Civil Rights Act of 1968 displaced § 1982 or made this case inappropriate for decision.

Holding

No. The 1968 Act did not alter § 1982 or eliminate the need to decide the petitioners' claim.

Reasoning

Section 1982 and the 1968 Fair Housing Act differ substantially. Section 1982 is a general Reconstruction-era prohibition on racial discrimination in property transactions, while the newer law addresses additional forms of discrimination, supplies administrative and governmental enforcement mechanisms, and contains specified exemptions.

Congress did not repeal or amend § 1982 when it enacted the 1968 Act. The two statutes therefore operate independently, and the later Act did not change the substantive reach of § 1982.

The newer Act also did not provide these petitioners an effective remedy for their 1965 injury. Its relevant provisions were not yet applicable to the development, were not retroactive to the alleged discrimination, and would in any event face statutory time limits.

Concurrences

Justice Douglas

Reasoning

Justice Douglas agreed that § 1982 validly enforces the Thirteenth Amendment because the inability of Black citizens to buy, sell, hold, or contract for property is a badge of slavery. He stressed that enslaved people were denied legal personhood and could neither own property nor freely make contracts.

He wrote separately to emphasize that the legacy of slavery persisted not merely through formal legal restrictions but through entrenched racial prejudice. Drawing on the long history of discrimination in voting, education, housing, public facilities, employment, and jury service, he argued that racial exclusion in property markets remained one of slavery's surviving incidents.

Douglas also rejected the suggestion that entrenched housing discrimination might fall outside the statute because it did not arise from a formally identifiable custom. In his view, widespread residential segregation itself reflected a longstanding customary pattern of organized white discrimination that Congress could address.

Dissents

Justice Harlan

Reasoning

Justice Harlan, joined by Justice White, believed the Court should have dismissed the writ as improvidently granted rather than decide the case. Congress had just enacted comprehensive fair-housing legislation that would soon provide prospective relief in cases like this one, and he thought that development substantially reduced the public importance of resolving difficult questions under a century-old statute.

On the merits, Harlan concluded that § 1982 was at least seriously ambiguous and was more naturally read to guarantee equal legal status against state-sanctioned discrimination, rather than to impose an absolute duty on private persons to sell or lease property without racial discrimination. He relied on the original Act's references to laws, ordinances, regulations, and customs, as well as prior decisions such as Corrigan and Hurd, which he read as treating the statute as directed at governmental action.

Harlan maintained that the legislative history did not clearly establish the majority's private-action interpretation. He emphasized statements by Senator Trumbull and House sponsors that the Act would have no operation where state law gave all citizens equal civil rights, and he read those statements as evidence that the Act targeted discriminatory state laws and official or community-sanctioned conduct.

He also thought it unlikely that the Reconstruction Congress, in an era strongly protective of private property and individual autonomy, meant silently to prohibit purely private racial discrimination in every property transaction. Had Congress intended such a major intrusion into private choice, Harlan believed the debates would have addressed it directly.

Because the statutory question was doubtful, Harlan viewed the constitutional holding as especially troubling. He believed the Court unnecessarily embraced a broad and difficult proposition: that the Thirteenth Amendment authorizes Congress to regulate wholly private property transactions as a means of eliminating the badges and incidents of slavery.