Court Opinion

ID: 9423438
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 23:07:46.86274+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:22:44.282342
License: Public Domain

Mr. Justice Douglas,
concurring.
While I join the opinion of the Court, I add a word to indicate the dimensions of our problem.
This is not a case as simple as the one where a man with a bicycle or a car or a stock certificate or even a log cabin asserts the right to sell it to whomsoever he pleases, excluding all others whether they be Negro, Chinese, Japanese, Russians, Catholics, Baptists, or those with blue eyes. We deal here with a problem in the realm of zoning, similar to the one we had in Shelley v. Kraemer, 334 U. S. 1, where we struck down restrictive covenants.
Those covenants are one device whereby a neighborhood is kept “white” or “Caucasian” as the dominant interests desire. Proposition 14 in the setting' of our modern housing problem is only another device of the same character.
Real estate brokers and mortgage lenders are largely dedicated to the maintenance of segregated communities.1 Realtors commonly believe it is unethical to sell or rent to a Negro in a predominantly white or all-white neighborhood,2 and mortgage lenders throw their weight along*382side segregated communities, rejecting applications by members of a minority group who try to break the white phalanx save and unless the neighborhood is in process of conversion into a mixed or a Negro community.3 We are told by the Commission on Civil Rights:
“Property owners’ prejudices are reflected, magnified, and sometimes even induced by real estate brokers, through whom most housing changes hands. Organized brokers have, with few exceptions, followed the principle that only a ‘homogeneous’ neighborhood assures economic soundness. Their views in some cases are so vigorously expressed as to discourage property owners who would otherwise be concerned only with the color of a purchaser’s money, and not with that of his skin. . . .[4]
“The financial community, upon which mortgage financing — and hence the bulk of home purchasing and home building — depends, also acts to a large extent on the premise that only a homogeneous neighborhood can offer an economically sound investment. For this reason, plus the fear of offending their other clients, many mortgage-lending institutions refuse to provide home financing for houses in a ‘mixed’ neighborhood. The persistent stereotypes of certain minority groups as poor credit *383risks also block the flow of credit, although these stereotypes have often been proved unjustified.” Housing, U. S. Commission on Civil Rights 2-3 (1961).
The builders join in the same scheme:5
. . private builders often adopt what they believe are the views of those to whom they expect to sell and of the banks upon whose credit their own operations depend. In short, as the Commission on Race and Housing has concluded, ‘it is the real estate brokers, builders, and mortgage finance institutions, which translate prejudice into discriminatory action.’ Thus, at every level of the private housing market members of minority groups meet mutually reinforcing and often unbreakable barriers of rejection.”
Proposition 14 is a form of sophisticated discrimination 6 whereby the people of California harness the energies of private groups to do indirectly what they cannot under our decisions7 allow their government to do.
George A. McCanse, chairman of the legislative committee of the Texas Real Estate Association, while giving his views on Title IV of the proposed Civil Rights Act of 1966 (H. R. 14765), which would prohibit discrimination in housing by property owners, real estate brokers, and others engaged in the sale, rental or financing of housing, stated that he warned groups to which he spoke of “the grave dangers inherent in any type *384of legislation that would erode away the rights that go with the ownership of property.” 8 He pointed out that
“[E]ach time we citizens of this country lose any of the rights that go with the ownership of property, we are moving that much closer to a centralized government in which ultimately the right to own property would be denied.” 9
That apparently is a common view. It overlooks several things. First, the right to own or lease property is already denied to many solely because of the pigment of their skin; they are, indeed, under the control of a few who determine where and how the colored people shall live and what the nature of our cities will be. Second, the agencies that are zoning the cities along racial lines are state licensees.
Zoning is a state and municipal function. See Euclid v. Ambler Co., 272 U. S. 365, 389 et seq.; Berman v. Parker, 348 U. S. 26, 34-35. When the State leaves that function to private agencies or institutions which are licensees and which practice racial discrimination and zone our cities into white and black belts or white and black ghettoes, it suffers a governmental function to be performed under private auspices in a way the State itself may not act. The present case is therefore kin to Terry v. Adams, 345 U. S. 461, 466, where a State allowed a private group (known as the Jaybird Association, which was the dominant political group in county elections) to perform an electoral function in derogation of the rights of Negroes under the Fifteenth Amendment.
Leaving the zoning function to groups which practice racial discrimination and are licensed by the States *385constitutes state action in the narrowest sense in which Shelley v. Kraemer, supra, can be construed. For as noted by Mr. Justice Black in Bell v. Maryland, 378 U. S. 226, 329 (dissenting), restrictive covenants “constituted a restraint on alienation of property, sometimes in perpetuity, which, if valid, was in reality the equivalent of and had the effect of state and municipal zoning laws, accomplishing the same kind of racial discrimination as if the State had passed a statute instead of leaving this objective to be accomplished by a system of private contracts, enforced by the State.”
Under California law no person may “engage in the business, act in the capacity of, advertise or assume to act as a real estate broker or a real estate salesman within this State without first obtaining a real estate license.” Calif. Bus. & Prof. Code § 10130. These licensees are designated to serve the public. Their licenses are not restricted, and could not be restricted, to effectuate a policy of segregation. That would be state action that is barred by the Fourteenth Amendment. There is no difference, as I see it, between a State authorizing a licensee to practice racial discrimination and a State, without any express authorization of that kind nevertheless launching and countenancing the operation of a licensing system in an environment where the whole weight of the system is on the side of discrimination. In the latter situation the State is impliedly sanctioning what it may not do specifically.
If we were in a domain exclusively private, we would have different problems. But urban housing is in the public domain as evidenced not only by the zoning problems presented but by the vast schemes of public financing with which the States and the Nation have been extensively involved in recent years. Urban housing is clearly marked with the public interest. Urban housing, *386like restaurants, inns, and carriers (Bell v. Maryland, 378 U. S. 226, 253-255, separate opinion), or like telephone companies, drugstores, or hospitals, is affected with a public interest in the historic and classical sense. See Lombard v. Louisiana, 373 U. S. 267, 275-278 (concurring opinion).
I repeat what was stated by Holt, C. J., in Lane v. Cotton, 12 Mod. 472, 484 (1701):
“[W] her ever any subject takes upon himself a public trust for the benefit of the rest of his fellow-subjects, he is eo ipso bound to serve the subject in all the things that are within the reach and comprehension of such an office, under pain of an action against him .... If on the road a shoe fall off my horse, and I come to a smith to have one put on, and the smith refuse to do it, an action will lie against him, because he has made profession of a trade which is for the public good, and has thereby exposed and vested an interest of himself in all the King’s subjects that will employ him in the way of his trade. If an innkeeper refuse to entertain a guest where his house is not full, an action will lie against him, and so against a carrier, if his horses be not loaded, and he refuse to take a packet proper to Be sent by a carrier.”
Since the real estate brokerage business is one that can be and is state-regulated and since it is state-licensed, it must be dedicated, like the telephone companies and the carriers and the hotels and motels, to the requirements of service to all without discrimination — a standard that in its modern setting is conditioned by the demands of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
*387And to those who say that Proposition 14 represents the will of the people of California, one can only reply:
“Wherever the real power in a Government lies, there is the danger of oppression. In our Governments the real power lies in the majority of the Community, and the invasion of private rights is chiefly to be apprehended, not from acts of Government contrary to the sense of its constituents, but from acts in which the Government is the mere instrument of the major number of the Constituents. This is a truth of great importance, but not yet sufficiently attended to . . . 5 Writings of James Madison 272 (Hunt ed. 1904).

 Civil Rights U. S. A., Housing in Washington, D. C., U. S. Commission on Civil Rights 12-15 (1962).

 Id., 12-13.

 Id., 14-15.

 As the Hannah Commission said:
“Area housing patterns are sharply defined along racial lines. Most members of the housing industry appear to respect them. Although it is unlikely that these patterns are determined by formal agreement, it is probable that they are maintained by tacit understandings.” Id., 15.

 Housing, U. S. Commission on Civil Rights 3 (1961).

 Freedom to the Free, Century of Emancipation, Report to the President, U. S. Commission on Civil Rights 96 (1963).

 City of Richmond v. Deans, 281 U. S. 704.

 Hearings before Subcommittee No. 5 of the House Committee on the Judiciary, 89th Cong., 2d Sess., ser. 16, 1639 (1966).

 Ibid.