In 1953, the Supreme Court ended this circumvention of Shelley. It ruled that the Fourteenth Amendment precluded state courts not only from evicting African Americans from homes purchased in defiance of a restrictive covenant but also from adjudicating suits to recover damages from property owners who made such sales. Still, the Court refused to declare that such private contracts were unlawful or even that county clerks should be prohibited from accepting deeds that included them. It took another nineteen years before a federal appeals court ruled that the covenants themselves violated the
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