Buchanan v. Warley: The Test Case They Built on Purpose
Near Louisville, Kentucky
In nineteen fourteen, the Louisville city government passed a racial residential zoning ordinance, one of the first in the nation. The law made it illegal to sell property in a majority-white block to a Black buyer, and vice versa. The stated purpose was to prevent racial tension. The actual purpose was to lock the city's racial geography into law.
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People decided to challenge it. But they needed the right case. So they built one deliberately.
William Warley, the head of Louisville's NAACP chapter, agreed to purchase a piece of property on Block Street in a majority-white neighborhood from a white seller named Charles Buchanan. Warley inserted language into the purchase offer stating that he was not obligated to pay if he could not legally occupy the property as a Black man. Buchanan, who supported the legal challenge, sued Warley to compel payment. Warley's defense was that the city ordinance made the contract unenforceable.
The case reached the United States Supreme Court as Buchanan versus Warley. On November fifth, nineteen seventeen, the Court ruled unanimously that Louisville's ordinance violated the Fourteenth Amendment's protection of property rights. The decision did not say that residential segregation was morally wrong. It said the government could not use the power of law to enforce it through zoning.
What followed was the private sector's answer to the ruling. Deed restrictions, or restrictive covenants, written directly into property deeds, accomplished the same segregation without government authority. Banks refused loans in Black neighborhoods. Insurance companies declined coverage. The federal Home Owners' Loan Corporation drew its redlining maps of Louisville in the late nineteen thirties, formally grading Black neighborhoods as financial hazards. The court had struck down the ordinance. The segregation remained.
