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A Court Decision Leads to Broadway

Lorraine Vivian Hansberry based her 1959 play, A Raisin in the Sun, on her family’s experience purchasing a home in the Washington Park subdivision of Chicago, Illinois, which maintained a racially restrictive covenant. After her father, Carl, put a down payment on a home in the neighborhood, white neighbors sued to enforce the covenant and won based on a ruling in a previous class action lawsuit. Hansberry appealed to the Supreme Court, and in Hansberry  v. Lee (1940), the Justices ruled that while racially restrictive covenants were legal, Hansberry’s suit could be contested because Hansberry’s interests were not adequately represented in the prior class action lawsuit. In 2010, Chicago named the house after Ms. Hansberry and designated it a city landmark.

The Court returned to the question of racially restrictive covenants a few years later, in Shelley v. Kraemer (1948), ruling that state court enforcement of them was a violation of the Equal Protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.