Last week, a sibling shared a legal document for the home our parents built in 1957 near La Grange. Our family sold the home a few years ago. Our mother lived there for about 60 years. I was raised there.

The document appeared to be a covenant from the developer of the subdivision to the buyers of the lot, our parents. There was a legal description of the property, wording about setbacks and drainage, and a note about restrictions against keeping cattle, sheep or other animals.

Tucked into the middle of a sentence about construction and building plans was a clause that felt jolting in its casual, mater-of-fact tone.

“… No part of said subdivision shall at any time be leased, conveyed nor sold to nor occupied by any person not a Caucasian …”

It is one thing to read about legalized racism. It is another to realize one’s own family helped perpetuate systemic inequality. The jarring realization hit close to home, literally.

I suspected such legal documents were common throughout suburban Chicago and the rest of the United States. Legalized racism didn’t end with the abolition of slavery in the 1860s or the civil rights movement that targeted Jim Crow laws in the 1960s.

This realization is important because too many Americans wrongly believe poverty results from laziness, poor parenting or some other moral failing. Rather, the document proves the existence of a system that denied Blacks the chance to raise families in areas where homes appreciated in value and accumulated wealth that could be passed along to future generations.

Another reason this matters is because poverty, I believe, is the root cause of gun violence that plagues some neighborhoods in Chicago and several south suburbs.

How complicit in perpetuating systemic inequality were suburban white families who signed covenants that prohibited them from selling their property to Blacks?

The south suburbs are like a perfect laboratory to study the issue of racial segregation and wealth disparity. Many communities are predominantly African American, while many others are almost exclusively white.

These facts are easily supported with data from such sources as the Census Bureau and the Illinois State Board of Education, which tracks race, income and other demographics that characterize school children.

Data also support differences in resources and quality of schools, hospitals, parks, public safety and other services. Property taxes primarily fund local services. In general, communities with greater wealth tend to offer better services.

Documents like the covenant for my parents’ house help dispel the myth that living in an impoverished neighborhood is a choice. Discriminatory laws and unfair practices effectively banned Blacks from living in many communities, relatively recently.

Attorney John Murphey represents several south suburban municipalities. He has researched and written about laws that promoted racism. He wrote an essay about his research for a recent Black History Month observance.

Murphey said the 1948 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Shelley v. Kraemer outlawed documents like the one attached to my parents’ home. In that ruling, justices considered how discriminatory practices that involved private parties, such as buyers and sellers of real estate, were not state laws or municipal ordinances.

“We conclude, therefore, that the restrictive agreements standing alone cannot be regarded as violative of any rights guaranteed to petitioners by the Fourteenth Amendment,” justices wrote.

The 14th Amendment was ratified in 1868, not long after the end of the Civil War that divided the country and cost the lives of about 620,000 Americans.

Private parties could agree to the terms of such covenants, the court unanimously determined in the landmark decision. However, any state or local entity that attempted to enforce such racially restrictive agreements would violate the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment, the court found.

“The attorney who won the case was Thurgood Marshall, later a Supreme Court justice,” Murphey said. “After ‘Shelley,’ title insurance companies across the country universally cite ‘Shelley’ and note the restriction is unenforceable.”

The document for my parents’ home mentioned taxes for 1957, the year our parents built their home. That meant the provision preventing Blacks from living in the neighborhood was still used nine years after the Supreme Court outlawed such practices.

I could find no satisfactory explanation for why that was the case. I suspect private parties continued using similar practices for many years after the 1948 decision.

“My sense is that many suburban post-WWII housing developments here in Chicago and nationally contained these type of restrictions, probably most infamous was Levittown in New York,” said John Petruszak, executive director of the Homewood-based South Suburban Housing Center.

Since 1975, the private organization has worked to promote fair housing and to eliminate discriminatory practices in real estate.

America has an ugly history of keeping Blacks from integrating communities. Vigilantes sometimes firebombed homes occupied by Blacks to maintain the exclusivity of all-white areas. Less violent practices let Black families know that they were unwelcome.

“On the other end of the spectrum were places like Park Forest that by the late 1950s were developing planned integration policies and adopting fair housing ordinances,” Petruszak said.

State lawmakers adopted court decisions prohibiting enforcement of discriminatory covenants with amendments to the Illinois Human Rights Act in 2016, Petruszak pointed out.

“Every provision in an oral agreement or a written instrument relating to real property which purports to forbid or restrict the conveyance, encumbrance, occupancy, or lease thereof on the basis of race, color, religion, or national origin is void,” according to the law.

Laws may change, but politicians continue to stoke fears of diversity and fairness in housing. President Donald Trump’s current campaign strategy is to make suburbanites fear a future under the leadership of Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee.

“I am happy to inform all of the people living their Suburban Lifestyle Dream that you will no longer be bothered or financially hurt by having low income housing built in your neighborhood,” Trump wrote Wednesday on Twitter.

“Your housing prices will go up based on the market, and crime will go down,” Trump wrote. “I have rescinded the Obama-Biden AFFH Rule. Enjoy!”

AFFH, or Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing, is a provision of the Fair Housing Act of 1968. In 2015, the Obama administration adopted a rule requiring agencies receiving federal money for housing to examine whether there were barriers to fair housing and if so, to create plans to address them.

Trump’s position shows that racially discriminatory practices in housing remain a relevant topic today.

tslowik@tribpub.com

Ted Slowik is a columnist for the Daily Southtown.