Richmond's racial zoning ordinances
Ordinance adopted April 1911; a second ordinance struck down in 1930Richmond City Hall, and the blocks the ordinances divided, Richmond City, VA
Richmond made residential segregation city law in 1911, barring Black families from blocks where most residents were white. When the Supreme Court struck such ordinances down, the city wrote a new one on top of the Racial Integrity Act - and lost that one too, in 1930.
In April 1911 the Richmond City Council adopted an ordinance providing for the strict domiciliary segregation of the white and colored population: a Black family could not move into a block where most of the houses were occupied by white residents, and the reverse. The General Assembly passed enabling legislation for the rest of the state in 1912. This was not custom or covenant. It was municipal law, enforced by the city.
It lasted six years. In 1917, in Buchanan v. Warley, the Supreme Court struck down a Louisville ordinance of exactly this design, holding that the Fourteenth Amendment did not permit a city to interfere with the right to buy, sell and occupy property on the ground of the owner's or occupant's race. Richmond's ordinance fell with it.
The city then tried to reach the same end through a different statute. In 1929 it passed a new segregation ordinance built on Virginia's 1924 Racial Integrity Act: no person could live in a neighbourhood where they were forbidden to marry a member of the majority population there. Since the Racial Integrity Act forbade a white person from marrying anyone with any trace of other ancestry, the effect was identical to the ordinance the Court had already voided, with the racial definition moved into the marriage law. The Fourth Circuit held it unconstitutional, and the Supreme Court affirmed in City of Richmond v. Deans in 1930.
What followed is the reason the two defeats changed so little. The line that the city could no longer draw by ordinance was drawn instead by private racial covenants, by the Home Owners' Loan Corporation's 1937 security map, and by Federal Housing Administration underwriting rules - instruments no court struck down for decades, and which were federal rather than municipal, so that Richmond no longer had to pass anything at all.
Both ordinances were struck down, but the colour line they drew was then held in place by covenants, HOLC grading and FHA underwriting instead.
Sources
- Timeline of Housing Events, Mapping Inequality online exhibitionLibrary of Virginialva.virginia.govRichmond's 1911 residential segregation ordinance, the 1912 state enabling act, the 1929 ordinance grounded in the racial integrity law, and its defeat in the Fourth Circuit.
- Buchanan v. Warley, 245 U.S. 60 (1917)United States Reports, Library of Congresstile.loc.govThe decision that voided municipal racial zoning ordinances of the kind Richmond had adopted in 1911.
- City of Richmond v. Deans, 281 U.S. 704United States Reports, volume 281 (1930)The Supreme Court's affirmance of the Fourth Circuit's judgment against Richmond's second segregation ordinance, the one built on the Racial Integrity Act.