Blockbusting is a business process of U.S. real estate agents and building developers to convince white property owners to sell their house at low prices, which they do by promoting fear in those house owners that racial minorities will soon be moving into the neighborhood. The agents then sell those same houses at much higher prices to black families desperate to escape the overcrowded ghettos. Blockbusting became possible after the legislative and judicial dismantling of legally protected racially segregated real estate practices after World War II. By the 1980s it largely disappeared as a business practice, after changes in law and the real estate market.
Bloomingdale is a neighborhood in the Northwest quadrant of Washington, D.C., less than two miles (3 km) north of the United States Capitol building. It is a primarily residential neighborhood, with a small commercial center near the intersection of Rhode Island Avenue and First Street NW featuring bars, restaurants, and food markets.
A covenant, in its most general sense and historical sense, is a solemn promise to engage in or refrain from a specified action. Under historical English common law a covenant was distinguished from an ordinary contract by the presence of a seal. Because the presence of a seal indicated an unusual solemnity in the promises made in a covenant, the common law would enforce a covenant even in the absence of consideration. In United States contract law, an implied covenant of good faith is presumed.
Hansberry v. Lee, 311 U.S. 32 (1940), is a famous case now usually known in civil procedure for teaching that res judicata may not bind a subsequent plaintiff who had no opportunity to be represented in the earlier civil action. The facts of the case dealt with a racially restrictive covenant that barred African Americans from purchasing or leasing land in the Washington Park Subdivision of Chicago's Woodlawn neighborhood. The covenant had been upheld in a prior class action lawsuit, which had included Lee, along with all the other neighborhood landowners, as members of the class. The defense in the present case argued that Carl Augustus Hansberry could not contest the covenant because it had already been deemed valid by the courts in the prior lawsuit. The plaintiff's case was successfully argued by civil rights attorney Earl B. Dickerson.
Margaret Bush Wilson was an American lawyer and activist. Wilson broke many barriers as an African-American woman throughout her professional career.
The Washington Park Subdivision is the name of the historic 3-city block by 8-city block subdivision in the northwest corner of the Woodlawn community area, on the South Side of Chicago in Illinois that stands in the place of the original Washington Park Race Track. The area evolved as a redevelopment of the land previously occupied by the racetrack. It was originally an exclusively white neighborhood that included residential housing, amusement parks, and beer gardens.
The Washington Park Court District is a Grand Boulevard community area neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago, Illinois. It was designated a Chicago Landmark on October 2, 1991. Despite its name, it is not located within either the Washington Park community area or the Washington Park park, but is one block north of both. The district was named for the Park.
Loren Miller was an American journalist, civil rights activist, attorney and judge. Miller was appointed to the Superior Court of California, County of Los Angeles, by former governor Edmund G. Brown in 1964 and serving until his death 1967. Miller was a specialist in housing discrimination, whose involvement in the early stages of the Civil Rights Movement earned him a reputation as a tenacious fighter for equal housing opportunities for minorities. Miller argued some of the most historic civil rights cases ever heard before the U.S. Supreme Court. He was chief counsel before the court in the 1948 decision that led to the outlawing of racial restrictive covenants, Shelley v. Kraemer.
The Louis Brandeis House is a National Historic Landmark on Judges Way, a private way off Stage Neck Road in Chatham, Massachusetts. It stands on a neck of land near the Oyster Pond River. It received its landmark designation in 1972 as the principal summer residence of Louis Brandeis, an Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court, who summered here from 1922 until his death in 1941.
The Joseph Erlanger House is a historic house at 5127 Waterman Boulevard in St. Louis, Missouri. As a National Historic Landmark, it was designated to recognize the achievements of Joseph Erlanger (1874-1965), an American doctor and physiologist, who was awarded with the Nobel Prize in medicine in 1944. It was Erlanger's home from 1917 until his death. It was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1976. However, the house is not open to the public.
The Eugene Field House is a historic house museum at 634 South Broadway in St. Louis, Missouri. Built in 1845, it was the home of Roswell Field, an attorney for Dred Scott in the landmark Dred Scott v. Sandford court case. Field's son, Eugene Field, was raised there and became a noted writer of children's stories. A National Historic Landmark, it is now a museum known as the Field House Museum.
The Scott Joplin House State Historic Site is located at 2658 Delmar Boulevard in St. Louis, Missouri. It preserves the Scott Joplin Residence, the home of composer Scott Joplin from 1901 to 1903. The house and its surroundings are maintained by the Missouri Department of Natural Resources as a state historic site. The house was added to the National Register of Historic Places and designated a U.S. National Historic Landmark in 1976.
Shelley v. Kraemer, 334 U.S. 1 (1948), is a landmark United States Supreme Court case that struck down racially restrictive housing covenants.
Corrigan v. Buckley, 271 U.S. 323 (1926), was a U.S. Supreme Court case in 1926 that ruled that the racially restrictive covenant of multiple residents on S Street NW, between 18th Street and New Hampshire Avenue in Washington, D.C., was a legally binding document which made the selling of a house to a black family a void contract. This ruling set the precedent upholding racially restrictive covenants in Washington; soon after this ruling, racially restrictive covenants flourished around the nation.
Fredda Witherspoon, formerly Fredda Crawford, was an educator and activist in St. Louis, Missouri. She was also known for her close ties to the community, serving as the president of the Missouri Conference of the NAACP and as vice chair of the St. Louis Urban League.
McIntyre-Burri House is a historic home located at St. Joseph, Missouri. It was built about 1870, and is a two-story, Italianate style brick dwelling. A rear frame addition was constructed in 1907, when the house was converted to a duplex. It has a low pitched cross-gable roof, segmental arched openings, and a full-width front porch with Tuscan order columns.
Hurd v. Hodge, 334 U.S. 24 (1948), was a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court held that the Fourteenth Amendment prohibits a federal court from enforcing restrictive covenants that would prohibit a person from owning or occupying property based on race or color. A companion case to Shelley v. Kraemer, Hurd v. Hodge involved racially restrictive covenants on houses in the Bloomingdale neighborhood of Washington, D.C..
Ghettos in the United States are typically urban neighborhoods perceived as being high in crime and poverty. The origins of these areas are specific to the United States and its laws, which created ghettos as the sometimes-intended, sometimes-unintended consequences of both governmental legislations and private efforts to segregate America for political, economic, social, and ideological reasons: de jure and de facto segregation. De facto segregation continues today in areas such as residential segregation and school segregation because of both contemporary behavior and the historical legacy of de jure segregation.
