The house is arranged with apartments upstairs and downstairs, entered by separate doors from the front porch.

The framed front porch rests on brick pillars, with wood columns supporting the shed roof.

[3] The J. D. Shelley family had moved from Starkville, Mississippi in 1930, fleeing from racially motivated violence.

The U.S. Office of the Solicitor General filed, for the first time in a civil rights case, an amicus curiae ("friend of the court") brief in support of the Shelleys.

The May 3, 1948 decision rendered all racially restrictive covenants unenforceable on the grounds that enforcing them would violate the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.