On the Beat
Thursday, October 30, 2008
Caucasians Only: When I moved into Santa Barbara’s San Roque neighborhood recently, I learned that when the county recorded this part of the subdivision in 1948, no one but “Caucasians” could live here.
“Occupancy of said residential lots shall be restricted to members of the Caucasian Race,” reads part “D” of the “Protective Covenants.”
Which means that if presidential candidate Barack Obama time-traveled back to 1948, he might have trouble moving in with his wife and two children. As the notice with my title insurance points out, these kinds of restrictions are illegal due to state and federal fair housing laws enacted since then and can’t be enforced.
On the Beat
Whether the Caucasians-only restriction was ever enforced on my street in San Roque, or anywhere else in the county, I don’t know. Situated on the upper-State-Street northside, San Roque is considered one of the town’s most comfortable middle-income family neighborhoods, but in postwar Santa Barbara I doubt if it was some sort of elite enclave for the rich wishing to avoid having to share it with minorities.
According to the covenants, any property owner in my La Cumbre Park No. 2 could sue a violator. Title officials I talked to see these racial restrictions fairly often in the original documents copied when someone buys a home in Santa Barbara County. “I’ve seen it a lot,” one escrow officer told me. “It’s horrifying.”
It might have been especially chilling to the black family that lives up the street from me. Such is our country’s history of “legal” discrimination, even in the North.
When developers of the tract, north of State Street near Alamar Avenue, recorded the subdivision with the county they listed all sorts of restrictions.
This included such things as setbacks, building heights, requirements that no home be less than 900 square feet in area, stipulations that hedges couldn’t exceed five feet nor fences exceed four feet, and that a “grass lawn shall be planted and maintained in all front yards of residential lots.” No “noxious or offensive activity” could be engaged in, “nor shall anything be done thereon which may become an annoyance or nuisance to the neighborhood,” and no one could live in a “trailer, basement, tent, shack, garage, barn or other outbuilding.”
Such urban restrictions, and many others, including some against keeping farm animals behind the house, have a long history in Santa Barbara County. When it was common for wealthy families to employ live-in Chinese servants, some Caucasians-only restrictions made an exception to allow servants to reside in a home.
While I couldn’t learn whether the Caucasians-only restriction recorded on my tract was ever invoked, I do know that a U.S. Supreme Court decision at about the same time made it invalid. One case originated in 1945, when a black family named Shelley bought a home in St. Louis, Missouri. They had no idea that a restrictive covenant had been in place on the property since 1911, according to an account on Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia. “The restrictive covenant barred ‘people of the Negro or Mongolian Race’ from owning the property. Neighbors sued to restrain the Shelleys from taking possession of the property they had purchased.”
Learned justices on the Missouri Supreme Court, instead of throwing the suit out of court, found the covenant enforceable. The Shelleys lost. The court, in all its dubious wisdom, found that this was just a private agreement between the original parties that “ran with the land.”
A similar case came up in Detroit. A black couple, Orsel and Minnie McGhee, wanted to buy the home they’d rented for many years. In a lower court, one question raised was, what is a “Caucasian?” When the U.S. Supreme Court heard the two cases, one of the attorneys representing the McGhees was Thurgood Marshall. He became the first African American appointed to the Supreme Court, by President Lyndon Johnson, in 1967.
The Supreme Court decided the case on May 3, 1948. It was unanimous, 6-0. Three justices did not participate. The decision: Such racial covenants are, on their face, invalid under the U.S. Constitution’s 14th Amendment Equal Protection clause. The word apparently did not travel to Santa Barbara very quickly, because on July 30 the same year, at 50 minutes past 3 p.m., the county recorder put the official stamp on the San Roque document.
This, of course, was before Rosa Parks’s refusal to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama, bus, Martin Luther King Jr.’s historic leadership, freedom riders, and the 1964 civil rights legislation. Yet developers nationally continued to insert the covenants into property deeds until the 1960s.
As I read the Supreme Court’s decision on my front porch, a young black woman who lives up the street walked by. I waved at her and she waved at me and we said, “Hi.” Sue and I are new on the block and I expect to get to know her and other neighbors soon.
Barney Brantingham can be reached at barney@independent.com or 805-965-5205. He writes online columns throughout the week and a print column on Thursdays.