“As Much Right to Live in a House as Anybody”: Black Women and the Fight for Housing Integration in the 1940s

This article examines Black women’s roles within the legal campaign against racial restrictive covenants in private housing during the 1940s with a particular focus on local litigation in the years before Shelley v. Kraemer (1948). Through a critical reading of case records, private correspondence, oral histories, and press accounts, this article argues that women played an essential and largely unacknowledged role in the development of the anticovenant campaign by serving as pioneering homebuyers, litigants, and community mobilizers in support of legal cases. Further, it analyzes how gender, as much as race, shaped the substance of Black women’s experiences and contributions in the processes of litigation and gave unique contours to a resurgent rights consciousness in the wartime and immediate postwar period. By moving beyond a biographical approach to the study of women’s roles in the movement’s legal sphere and concentrating on the impact of gender at a critical inflection point in the 1940s, the article addresses an important gap in legal histories of the civil rights movement.¹