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Unjust Deeds: The Restrictive Covenant Cases and the Making of the Civil Rights Movement. By Jeffrey D. Gonda. Justice, Power, and Politics. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015. Pp. xii, 299. $34.95, ISBN 978-1-4696-2545-4.)
In Unjust Deeds: The Restrictive Covenant Cases and the Making of the Civil Rights Movement, Jeffrey D. Gonda argues that because the story of Shelley v. Kraemer (1948) has remained largely untold, the significant contributions of anticovenant lawyers to the civil rights movement have been overlooked. When the Supreme Court declared restrictive covenants unenforceable in deciding the Shelley case, the decision raised hopes that the nation's ghettos would be dismantled. But the considerable anticipation created by the decision was soon dashed by the reality of growing residential segregation. As a result, most scholars treat the case as irrelevant both because restrictive covenants were already failing and because the case did little to change the realities of the ghetto. Unjust Deeds restores Shelley to its rightful place in civil rights history by showing that the tactics developed by...