Exclusionary covenants

[Maxirad]

As many people know, there have been restrictive covenants that have historically barred people of color from owning certain pieces of property. They existed even in California. Can someone here on CAF tell me if exclusionary covenants that discriminated on the basis of religion were pervasive in California during the first half of the 20th century? I am particularly interested in those that discriminated against Jews and/or Catholics.

 

[George_Stegmeir]

I cannot speak about California, but I do know that Florida had such restrictions until the mid/late 1950’s. Jews could not rent a hotel room North of 41st Street in Miami Beach, and Jews could not buy or own real estate in Coral Gables until the late '50’s.
These caveats were fairly common in other parts of the country back then.
Today when people talk about civil rights, they think in terms of blacks and latinos. Well, they are Johnny come lately when it comes to predjudice! The immigration laws of the US are all based on racial and religious prejudice. The first such laws were enacted in the 1890’s to exclude asians, particularly Chinese and Japanese, to protect the US from the “Yellow Peril”. The next group of laws in the 1920’s excluded Eastern and Southern Europeans, in order to protect the US from Jews and Catholics. In fact, the prohibition laws that banned liquor was enacted to make the US unpopular for Catholics to immigrate to! That is how it was actually argued for in the Congress!

 

[TheWarriorMonk]

I can’t address California issues. Technically, the Civil Rights Act of 1866 could be construed as banning this discrimination, though obviously in practice it didn’t. It wasn’t until 1948 that the racial covenants were considered unconstitutional. Religious, and other types of, discrimination was addressed later.

Various types of discrimination pertaining to real property are permitted to exist, though typically not in covenant format. The discrimination deals with the use of private property; e.g., male-only golf clubs, religious facilities allowing only people of a certain religion to use the property, etc.