Sixty years ago, we took a big step toward racial justice.

On May 3, 1948, the U.S. Supreme Court declared that the enforcement of racially restrictive covenants in housing was unconstitutional.

That ruling was a landmark, but few Americans — other than lawyers, judges, scholars and law students — recognize it today.

The case was called Shelly v. Kraemer. J.D. and Ethel Shelly of St. Louis purchased a home at 4600 Labadie Avenue from a white individual. The day was Sept. 11, 1945. Not long after the Shelly family settled into their new home, they were sued for eviction by Louis and Fern Kraemer, a white couple who lived ten blocks away on the same street.

The house the Shelly family purchased contained a racially restrictive covenant in the deed. The covenant prohibited anyone from selling the house to someone of the “Negro or Mongolian Race.” The Kraemers sued the Shellys to invalidate the sale.

Back then, there were of thousands of such neighborhoods with such covenants all across the United States in 1945. Similar covenants were used to exclude Jews and Catholics from certain neighborhoods. When George W. Bush was elected President, it was discovered that he owned a house from 1988-1995 in Dallas that contained a racial covenant.

In 1926, the U.S. Supreme Court declared such racial covenants legal in Corrigan v. Buckley. Like the Dred Scott decision of 1857, and the Plessy decision of 1896, Corrigan was a cowardly legal moment.

Yet, almost immediately Americans of goodwill began the hard task of fixing this legal wrong.

Dedicated civil-rights lawyers like Charles Hamilton Houston of Washington, D.C., Thurgood Marshall of Baltimore, George Vaughn of St. Louis, Loren Miller of Los Angeles and Earl Dickerson of Chicago began to press lawsuits through the courts challenging racial covenants in American cities.

Finally, the Shelly case and several other cases involving racial covenants made it to the high court in 1948 for oral argument.

Justice Frank Murphy, the great New Deal liberal, was instrumental in convincing his colleagues on the court that it should tackle the issue of racial covenants in housing.

President Harry Truman authorized the federal government to side with the civil rights lawyers and the Shelly family in the case. The Truman administration filed an amicus brief supporting the unconstitutionality of enforcing the covenants.

Enforcement of racial covenants “cannot be reconciled with our mutual tolerance and respect for dignity and the rights of the individual which give vitality to our democratic way of life,” the brief read.

The case was heard by only six of the nine Supreme Court justices because three justices owned land that allegedly contained racially restrictive covenants. At argument, Solicitor General Phillip Perlman urged the court to relegate the covenants “to the limbo of other things as dead as slavery.”

And so it did, by a unanimous 6-0 vote. Many years later, J.D. Shelly would say: “It was a good thing we done this case.”

Yes, it was.

Brian Gilmore, a poet and a lawyer, lives in Takoma Park, Md. He can be reached at pmproj [at] progressive [dot] org.