So, between 1926 and 1948, there was a US Supreme Court case upholding racially restrictive covenants. There were also many state court cases reaching the same conclusion. So yes, the US courts had reviewed them and found them to be legally binding.
Furthermore, although from 1948 onwards they were officially legally unenforceable, it didn't stop new such covenants being made, which served as a social signal that non-white residents weren't welcome; the 1968 Fair Housing Act made it illegal to create such a covenant, as opposed to them merely being unenforceable in the courts.
> Furthermore, although from 1948 onwards they were officially legally unenforceable, it didn't stop new such covenants being made, which served as a social signal that non-white residents weren't welcome; the 1968 Fair Housing Act made it illegal to create such a covenant, as opposed to them merely being unenforceable in the courts.
Yeah, this is more what I was wondering about in my comment above. You had mentioned the idea of a "legal right to racially homogenous neighbours", and I was curious if that was actually an explicit legal right at any point rather than just something that in practice people did without getting into trouble. It sounds like there were a couple decades where it was explicitly a legal right, and then another couple decades after where it was in the "implicitly allowed despite not being considered legal" territory (and presumably for an indefinite period beforehand was also basically allowed, just without the definitive legal ruling on it).
To clarify, I didn't expect that you were wrong by using that phrasing earlier; I just had no clue either way, and it seemed like it might be useful context for the discussion either way.
Under English real estate law, while there are some constraints on your ability to make covenants, the rules are quite broad. A century ago, racial discrimination wasn't illegal or clearly contrary to public policy in most common law jurisdictions – indeed, many of them had explicitly racially discriminatory laws on the statute book – so racially restrictive covenants weren't obviously disallowed. The US, with its constitutional prohibition on discrimination in the 14th Amendment, was actually the only common law country in which there was a decent argument they weren't legal – but SCOTUS rejected that argument at first, then changed its mind over 20 years later. In the 1945 case Re Drummond Wren, the Ontario High Court ruled them illegal – but it cited the just signed United Nations Charter as grounds for doing so.