Washington Park Subdivision
The area evolved as a redevelopment of the land previously occupied by the racetrack and became an exclusively white neighborhood, which included residential housing, amusement parks, and beer gardens.
In this time, Chicago's demographics changed so that instead of having this population diluted in scattered places, it was concentrated in two large strips of land.
[3] When necessary, community organizations used violence to pursue their segregationist purposes, and between 1917 and 1921, bomb use discouraged encroachment into majority white neighborhoods.
[8] Local businessmen and the University of Chicago became alarmed at the prospect of poorer African Americans moving from the Black Belt due to a combination of racial succession and economic decline.
[3] In 1927, the private Chicago Real Estate Board (CREB) sent representatives throughout the city to promote such covenants, which it viewed as a progressive alternative to violence.
The language of the covenants state that no properties in the subdivision "...shall be sold, given, conveyed or leased to any negro or negroes, and no permission or license to use or occupy any part thereof shall be given to any negro except house servants or janitors or chauffeurs employed thereon..."[11] The covenants were signed by "owners of land on the one or the other side of Evans, Langley, Champlain, St. Lawrence, Rhodes, Eberhart, Vernon and South Park Avenues, between 60th and 63rd Streets and on 60th, 61st and 62nd Streets between South Park and Cottage Grove Avenues" on September 30, 1927, and they were recorded at the Cook County Register of Deeds on February 1, 1928.
Defendants argued that the stipulation made previously in Burke v. Kleiman that more than 95% of the owners had signed the covenant was false and the case should be re-adjudicated.
[10] The U. S. Supreme Court eventually reversed that ruling stating the application of res judicata in this case would violate Fourteenth Amendment.
[3] The play A Raisin in the Sun was inspired by Lorraine Hansberry's time in the neighborhood after her father won the repeal of restrictive covenants.
Smaller property owners were pressed to sell to realtors or directly to African Americans because the neighborhood was undergoing a racial transformation.
Future five-term Mayor of Chicago Richard J. Daley ran for Cook County Sheriff in 1946 as a progressive anti-covenant candidate.
[8] Eventually, in Shelley v. Kraemer, 334 U.S. 1 (1948), which was argued by Thurgood Marshall, the U. S. Supreme Court declared restrictive covenants in general unenforceable.
