Buchanan v. Warley: Supreme Court Strikes Down Racial Zoning, Property Rights Trump Civil Rights

The Supreme Court unanimously struck down a Louisville, Kentucky ordinance prohibiting Black residents from moving onto blocks where the majority of residents were white, and vice versa. While appearing to be a civil rights victory, the Court’s reasoning in Buchanan v. Warley rested entirely on property rights rather than racial equality. Justice William Day wrote that the ordinance violated the Fourteenth Amendment by depriving property owners of their right to dispose of property to willing buyers, not because racial segregation was unconstitutional.

The case arose from an NAACP test case in which a white seller (Buchanan) sought to enforce a contract to sell property to a Black buyer (Warley) in a white-majority block. The NAACP, led by its first president Moorfield Storey, strategically framed the case around property rights knowing the Court’s pro-business jurisprudence. Louisville’s ordinance was among similar laws passed in Baltimore, Richmond, Atlanta, and other cities as part of the first wave of de jure residential segregation.

The decision’s property rights foundation proved a double-edged sword. While it blocked explicit racial zoning, it left open alternative segregation mechanisms that worked through private action rather than law. Within years, cities developed racially restrictive covenants, discriminatory lending practices, and exclusionary zoning that achieved the same segregation without explicit racial language. The Court would uphold racially restrictive covenants in Corrigan v. Buckley (1926), and the federal government would institutionalize housing discrimination through FHA lending practices. Buchanan thus illustrates how the Court’s commitment to property rights could incidentally advance civil rights while leaving systemic racism largely intact.