Buchanan+v.+Warley

=Buchanan v. Warley= 245 U.S. 60 (1917)

A Louisville law barred African Americans from purchasing a house on a block in which a majority of the houses were owned by whites. Plaintiff was a white man who attempted to sell his house to a black man in violation of the statute, but whose sale was invalidated by the courts. Plaintiff challenged the statute under the Fourteenth Amendment.

Louisville argued that "such legislation tends to promote the public peace by preventing racial conflicts; that it tends to maintain racial purity; that it prevents the deterioration of property owned and occupied by white people, which deterioration it is contended, is sure to follow the occupancy of adjacent premises by persons of color." It asserted that the passage of the law was therefore within its police power.

The Court countered by noting that though the state's police power is broad, the state may not police through statutes that violate the federal Constitution.

It then stressed the purpose of the Reconstruction Amendments, quoting //The Slaughter-House Cases// and //Strauder v. West Virginia//: the Amendments were intended to secure all rights for African Americans and prevent discrimination by race or color in any form.

The question was, then, is the prevention of the sale of a white man's home because of the race of the proposed buyer a deprivation of the white man's property rights without due process of law, and therefore in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment?

The Court considered two cases offered by Louisville to support its law. First, the Court held that //Plessy v. Ferguson// gave no support. Though that case condoned the practice of segregation, its holding was limited to situations where equal provision was made for both races. The instant case afforded no such equality. Second, //Berea College v. Kentucky// did not help either; that case was merely about a state's power to regulate its own corporations, and did not discuss or decide an issue important to this case.

Louisville's concerns over the two races living in close quarters was not completely lost on the Court. "That there exists a serious and difficult problem arising from a feeling of race hostility which the law is powerless to control, and to which it must give a measure of consideration, may be freely admitted. But its solution cannot be promoted by depriving citizens of their constitutional rights and privileges."

However, the Court did not find the ordinance targeted to truly separate whites and blacks. Pointedly, the Court noted that black servants were permitted in white households, and that the ordinance did nothing to address the racial makeup of housing ownership on neighboring blocks. It framed the resolution of the case in terms of both the rights of white owners of property and the African American potential buyers:

"The case presented does not deal with an attempt to prohibit the amalgamation of the races. The right which the ordinance annulled was the civil right of the white man to dispose of his property if he saw fit to do so to a person of color and of a colored person to make such disposition to a white person."

This was not a proper exercise of police power. Instead, it was a deprivation of property rights without due process of law, in contravention of the Fourteenth Amendment.