Jones v. Alfred H. Mayer Co., 392 U.S. 409 (1968), argued 1–2 Apr. 1968, decided 17 June 1968 by vote of 7 to 2; Stewart for the Court, Harlan and White in dissent. This case established Congress's power under the
Thirteenth Amendment to legislate against private racial discrimination. It thus limited the
Civil Rights Cases (1883) holding that Congress lacked the power to reach private racial discrimination and became an important influence on the modern era of civil rights legislation.
Jones alleged that private defendants refused to sell him a home because he was black. He brought an action under a surviving remnant of the Civil Rights Act of 1866 (now Title 42, section 1982 of the U.S. Code) that grants all citizens the same right to purchase property. Section 1982 plainly invalidated nineteenth‐century southern states' black codes limiting blacks' power to own or lease property. The question in
Jones was whether the statute also reached private individual discriminatory acts. Justice Potter
Stewart's opinion for the Court provided a questionable analysis of section 1982’s text and legislative history and held that section 1982 reaches private behavior. Justice John M.
Harlan's dissent noted that the Court's interpretation of section 1982 made that statute a broad fair housing law, announced by the Court only months after Congress enacted the Civil Rights Act of 1968, which contained a more detailed fair housing law.
Congress's power to enact laws prohibiting private racial discrimination under the
Fourteenth Amendment is unclear, as suggested by the confusing array of opinions in
United States v.
Guest (1966).
Jones avoided addressing the Fourteenth Amendment power question by finding congressional power under the Thirteenth Amendment. It thus supplied a powerful new basis for federal race discrimination legislation. In the
Civil Rights Cases, the Court had indicated that, under the Thirteenth Amendment, Congress may outlaw not only
slavery itself but all badges or incidents of slavery as well. But it narrowly construed what those badges or incidents of slavery were and Congress's power to define them. It invalidated the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which prohibited discrimination in public accommodations, stating, “It would be running the slavery argument into the ground” (p. 24) to apply it to all private discriminatory acts in the area of public accommodations. In
Jones, the Court more generously interpreted Congress's power to assess what social conditions might be badges or incidents of slavery and sustained applying section 1982 to private behavior.
Jones established the foundation for the later holding in
Runyon v. McCrary (1976) that Title 42, section 1981 of the U.S. Code, a companion provision to section 1982, reaches private discrimination in
contracts. Together,
Jones and
Runyon establish sections 1981 and 1982 as broad federal antidiscrimination provisions covering most contractual and property relationships.
Jones’s questionable foundations reemerged in
Runyon, when Justices
White,
Rehnquist, and
Stevens voiced doubts about its correctness, and again thirteen years later in
Patterson v. McLean Credit Union (1989). By the time
Patterson arose, President Ronald
Reagan's appointees to the Court had changed its receptivity to civil rights litigation. In
Patterson, the Court took the unusual step of ordering the parties, on its own motion, to reargue the case and to address a question neither party had raised—whether
Runyon had been correctly decided. Following reargument, the Court's
Patterson opinion left
Runyon technically intact. But
Patterson severely limited
Runyon and section 1981 by holding that it protects only the initial decision to
contract and not post‐contractual behavior. The limiting interpretation probably is as attributable to lingering discontent with
Jones as it is to doubts about
Runyon itself.
Whatever doubts members of the Court have had about
Jones and
Runyon, Congress has never modified
Jones’s generous interpretation of section 1982 and
Runyon’s interpretation of section 1981. Congress's most important response to the Court was the
Civil Rights Act of 1991, which overruled
Patterson by interpreting section 1981 to include post‐contractual behavior.
See also
Housing Discrimination;
Property Rights;
Race and Racism.
Bibliography
Charles Fairman , History of the Supreme Court of the United States, vol. 6, Reconstruction and Reunion, 1864–88: Part One (1971).
Theodore Eisenberg
