Restrictive Covenants Likened to Jewish Ghettos at Hearing Before U.S. Supreme Court

Comparing restrictive covenants to the Nuremberg ?des forcing Jews into ghettos, a Washington attorney today told the Supreme Court ## at a covenant which would have forced a non-Jewish woman to oust her Jewish husband ?d their half-Jewish children from her home, was worse than the Nazi law, because ?e Nazis made exception to breaking up of families.

Phineas Indritz, co-attorney in a case involving restrictive property sold to Negro by a white owner in the District of Columbia, told the court that covenants effect such persons as Charles Curtis, former Vice-President of the United States, ?o vas a full-blooded Indian; Albert Einstein; former Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau; Marian Anderson and Negro Scientist George Washington Carver.

The Court today completed oral hearings on four cases involving racially restrictive covenants on real estate in St. Louis, Detroit and Washington.

The counsel defending covenants held that covenants are private agreements between private individuals and therefore not affected by the Fourteenth Amendment which makes discrimination illegal; that the covenants are recorded property rights ?ith the force of a legal contract and that it is the duty of the Court to enforce ?em. They also asked the Court to decide the cases only on the basis of the constitutionality of the covenants, and argued that sociological and economic data presented by the petitioners to show the detrimental effect of the covenants was no ?ot pertinent to the case.

Attorneys opposing the covenants pointed out that widespread use of the covenants amounted to indirect legislation that was discriminatory in effect and that the state–by previous court decisions and the spirit of the Fourteenth Amendment is legally prohibited from initiating or enforcing segregation. They also argued that court action constitutes no less a state action than action by the legislative or executive branches, and the state immediately became involved as soon as the contract was entered into since the agreement is made with the idea that the state will enforce it.

Without that tacit understanding, they argued, contracts would be useless. They also held that such covenants violate the constitutionally protected rights of the Negro to acquire property and that they violate the public policy of the United States.