The case arose after an African-American family purchased a house in St. Louis that was subject to a restrictive covenant preventing "people of the Negro or Mongolian Race" from occupying the property.

[2] 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 Solicitor General's brief filed on behalf of the United States government was written by four Jewish lawyers: Philip Elman, Oscar H. Davis, Hilbert P. Zarky, and Stanley M. Silverberg.

Justices Robert H. Jackson, Stanley F. Reed, and Wiley Blount Rutledge recused themselves from the case, likely because they each owned property that was subject to restrictive covenants.

[4] The Supreme Court held "that the [racially] restrictive agreements, standing alone, cannot be regarded as violative of any rights guaranteed to petitioners by the Fourteenth Amendment.

The court noted that the Fourteenth Amendment guarantees individual rights, and that equal protection of the law is not achieved by the imposition of inequalities: We have no doubt that there has been state action in these cases in the full and complete sense of the phrase.

The FHA commissioner Franklin D Richards announced two weeks later[7] that the decision would "in no way affect the programs of this agency" adding that it was not "the policy of the Government to require private individuals to give up their right to dispose of their property as they [see] fit, as a condition of receiving the benefits of the National Housing Act.

[10] It wasn't until the Mayers v Ridley decision in 1972[11] that it was ruled that the covenants themselves violated the Fair Housing Act and that county clerks should be prohibited from accepting deeds with such clauses.

[12] One year later, on December 2, 1949, US solicitor general Philip Perlman announced that the "FHA could no longer insure mortgages with restrictive covenants".

This caused the FHA to "cease financing subdivision developments whose builders openly refused to sell to black buyers.