IN 1902, WILLIAM WARLEY was getting ready to graduate from Central High School in Louisville, Kentucky. Warley, as one of the top students at Central and a leader of his class, was a bright, charismatic young Black man looking to make his mark on a country that didn’t yet value your intellect—or your rights—if you were the wrong color.
As Warley prepared himself to walk across his high school stage and accept his diploma, he was planning one of his first acts of civil disobedience. While he was on stage accepting his diploma, in front of the entire student body, parents, and, most importantly, teachers and administrators, the teenaged Warley planned on giving an impassioned speech about the pitiful state of Central High.
Thanks to the pernicious “separate but equal” rule endorsed by the Supreme Court in Plessy v. Ferguson, Central was the only Louisville high school that Black students were allowed to attend—and the education it provided was dismal. The school didn’t even offer a four-year program until 1893, and now in 1902, if any Central graduates wanted to go on to college, most had to take two years of college prep courses just to be adequately prepared.
Warley was going to expound on all of this and admonish the school’s leaders for failing the students they were entrusted to prepare for the world. Even as a teen, Warley was a passionate advocate for individual rights, and his speech promised to be something Central students and administrators would never forget.
But rumors about his planned speech got around and one of his favorite teachers, Mr. Mclellan (who would go on to write for the newspaper Warley started after he graduated college), spoke to the young firebrand and convinced him that, while his frustrations were valid, it wasn’t enough just to be right, he needed to think about the most effective way to achieve change.
Teacher got through to student and Mr. Mclellan convinced Warley that chastising the school during graduation wasn’t the best way to induce change. But Mclellan’s advice did more than help the young Warley avoid potential backlash—it also served as an important final lesson for the soon-to-be-graduate: fighting for what’s right requires passion and bravery, but winning victories for what’s right requires intelligence, creativity, and strategy.
Warley would take that lesson to heart. And it’s that lesson that would take him all the way to the Supreme Court as part of one of the most important civil rights and property rights cases of all time.
TO UNDERSTAND WARLEY, you need to understand the era and the town he grew up in.
William Warley was a Louisvillian from the day he entered into this world. He was born in the city on the river on January 6, 1884, to a South Carolina father and a Louisiana mother. Both his parents were Black southerners who had come “up north” to Louisville in the late 1800s. Louisville was an attractive city for Black Americans after the Civil War. Former Rhodes College history professor and administrator Russell Wigginton explains, “The two most prominent reasons that Blacks were drawn to Louisville were that the virulent forms of racism present elsewhere in the South were absent, and most Blacks in the city could find respectable nonagricultural work.”
But despite its general respect for equality before the law, turn-of-the-century Louisville wasn’t a city of perfect racial harmony. When describing Louisville, a Black reporter of the time wrote, “[the] races get along nicely—like oil and water—the whites at the top and the Negroes at the bottom.”
Warley grew up an only child sequestered to the subpar Black schools in Louisville, but he refused to be a victim of his position. He excelled in school, and after he graduated high school (sans firebranding speech), he attended State University in Louisville.
During his college years and after he graduated, Warley bounced around a couple of jobs. At first, he got a job as a doorman for a Louisville social club (the all-white Pendennis Club) and then became a mailman for the post office. But while being a postman was a high-status position for a Black man in Louisville at the time, Warley was unsatisfied with simply having a job that others were impressed with. So he teamed up with a successful Black businessman in Louisville, Lee Brown, and created the Louisville News newspaper.
The Louisville News was, as Warley described it, a “race paper” with “reading[s] of particular interest to colored people.” Now, with his own newspaper, William Warley had the platform to fight for the individual rights of Black Louisvillians. For example, in 1914, Warley used the Louisville News to lead a boycott of a theater in Louisville that discriminated against Black theatergoers by forcing them to use the back entrance of the theater and allowing them to occupy only the top balcony seats. The boycott was successful in forcing the theater to rescind the racist policies, and it also helped establish Warley as a leader of the civil rights movement in Louisville.
And the civil rights movement in Louisville was about to be tested more than it ever had been before.
IN THE 1910s, there was newfound opportunity away from the farm, and more Americans were moving to cities to experience it for themselves. Louisville was one of those cities on the rise.
Louisville’s population at the turn of the 20th century exploded. According to U.S. Census data, the city’s population in 1880 was 123,758. In 1910, it was nearly 224,000, and 18% of that population was Black.
As Louisville’s Black population grew, some of the city’s white residents grew uneasy that more and more Black families were moving into middle-class and upper-class neighborhoods. One of those “concerned citizens” was Walter Binford. Binford, who was white, was the superintendent of the mechanical department of the Louisville Courier-Journal newspaper and led a campaign encouraging the city council to pass a segregated zoning law. According to The Journal of Southern History (Vol. 34, No. 2), Binford gave a speech in 1913 to a local real estate group expounding on the horrors white Louisville families were being put through by living next to Black families: “One morning they awoke to find that a Negro family had purchased and was snugly ensconced in a three-story residence in one of the best and most exclusive white squares in the city.”
Binford’s despicable race-baiting and scare tactics didn’t work on the city’s real estate businessmen, many—if not most—of whom were vehemently against any segregated zoning law being passed in Louisville. But it did garner the attention of Democrats on the city council (then called the “Board of Aldermen”), and in 1914 the city passed one of the country’s first segregated zoning laws.
The title of Louisville’s new law said it all:
An ordinance to prevent conflict and ill-feeling between the white and colored races in the city of Louisville, and to preserve the public peace and promote the general welfare, by making reasonable provisions requiring, as far as practicable, the use of separate blocks, for residences, places of abode, and places of assembly by white and colored people respectively.
It had the supposedly separate but equal provisions: Just as no Black person could buy property and move into a predominantly white neighborhood, so too could no white person buy property and move into a mostly Black neighborhood. But the equality was a sham, the Board of Aldermen weren’t concerned with keeping white families out of rich Black neighborhoods, the law served to keep Black Louisvillians stuck in poorer and more run-down neighborhoods.
Just three months after the ordinance was adopted, the city prosecuted its first case. In August, Arthur Harris (who was Black) moved into a house in a white block. He was summoned to appear before a police court and found guilty of violating the new law. In December, the court upheld the conviction, stating that the ordinance “was extremely mild in its operation,” that it had a “scrupulous regard for property,” and that while the ownership of property was important, it could be regulated by the government–as settled by the Supreme Court in the Plessy v. Ferguson “separate but equal” railroad car case. This would be the first criminal conviction based on the law. But it was Mr. Warley’s subsequent civil suit that would put it to the most serious test.
IN THE LEAD-UP to Louisville passing the segregated zoning ordinance, Warley and the other Black leaders of the city knew they would have to be organized to have any chance of defeating the racist law, so they formed a local NAACP chapter and Warley was named president.
After seeing the futility of the political process, Warley and the NAACP turned their attention to the courts and began orchestrating a strategy that would (hopefully) induce the Supreme Court to overturn Louisville’s ordinance and segregated zoning ordinances like it in other cities across the country.
But first, they needed a case.
While Warley was campaigning against the ordinance before it passed, he found himself teaming up with white members of Louisville’s business community. Many local business leaders didn’t want anything to do with Jim Crow-style laws seeping into Louisville. Aside from the obvious moral reasons to oppose legally required discrimination, it was also bad for business. Having to create separate spaces and allocations for Black patrons and white patrons is expensive, and for businessmen in the real estate market, being allowed to sell/buy land and houses to/from only one race limits opportunities and slashes profit margins.
One of those business leaders Warley teamed up with was Charles Buchanan, a white real estate developer and realtor who wanted Louisville to stay free from any Jim Crow laws—especially any Jim Crow-styled zoning laws that threatened to decimate his real estate business. After the ordinance passed, Warley and Buchanan teamed up again to develop one of the most innovative Supreme Court cases ever argued in front of the nation’s High Court.
IN TERMS OF litigation creativity, Warley and Buchanan’s plan was brilliant.
They found a residential block of Louisville that had 10 homes—eight white families and two Black. Then Buchanan bought an undeveloped lot on that block which he turned around and agreed to sell to Warley. But in the contract for the sale, Warley and Buchanan put in an unusual—and very specific—provision:
It is understood that I [Warley] am purchasing the above property for the purpose of having erected thereon a house which I propose to make my residence, and it is a distinct part of this agreement that I shall not be required to accept a deed to the above property or to pay for said property unless I have the right under the laws of the State of Kentucky and the City of Louisville to occupy said property as a residence.
Both men signed the contract, but then Warley attempted to back out of the sale, citing Louisville’s segregated zoning law as the reason. After Warley tried backing out, Buchanan sued Warley for breach of contract, arguing that Louisville’s zoning law was unconstitutionally preventing him from selling his land to whomever he chose.
Buchanan lost the case at the district and appellate court levels, which meant the next step was the U.S. Supreme Court.
If this were a heist movie, here’s the part where everything lines up before the big score.
The Supreme Court hearing Buchanan v. Warley was the same Court that established the “separate but equal” doctrine, so Warley and Buchanan knew that making arguments against segregation would be losing battles. But Warley and Buchanan had concocted a perfect setup that challenged Louisville’s law on property rights and economic liberty grounds instead of the equal protection and discrimination grounds they knew the prejudiced Supreme Court would reject. Their case presented a Black man arguing that Louisville’s segregated zoning law shielded him from his contractual obligation while a white man was arguing that the law was unconstitutional. And to add to the irony, Buchanan was represented by the NAACP (which Warley was still president of) and Warley was represented by the Louisville city attorney.
The NAACP’s (Buchanan’s) arguments were careful not to expound about how Louisville’s law violated the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause (even though it did). Instead, Buchanan’s NAACP attorneys focused their arguments on how Louisville’s law violated Buchanan’s property rights and contract rights by preventing him from selling his land to a Black man wanting to live on it.
The arguments worked.
On November 5, 1917, the Supreme Court issued its opinion. First, the Court emphasized the importance of property rights in American law:
The Fourteenth Amendment protects life, liberty, and property from invasion by the states without due process of law. Property is more than the mere thing which a person owns. It is elementary that it includes the right to acquire, use, and dispose of it. The Constitution protects these essential attributes of property…. Property consists of the free use, enjoyment, and disposal of a person’s acquisitions without control or diminutions save by the law of the land.
Property rights were the key to defeating the law.
Even though the Court had wrongly decided previous segregation and discrimination cases, Warley v. Buchanan forced it to recognize and uphold the true intent of the Fourteenth Amendment: secure property rights and economic freedom for people regardless of someone’s race. As the decision states:
Colored persons are citizens of the United States and have the right to purchase property and enjoy and use the same without laws discriminating against them solely on the account of race.
Warley and Buchanan’s plan came to fruition perfectly; Warley “lost” the case but won the fight.
WILLIAM WARLEY WOULD stay active in Louisville politics and the civil rights movement for the rest of his life after Buchanan v. Warley. His victory in that case, however, would prove to be his most lasting.
Even though the Supreme Court would later on uphold zoning schemes that segregated people by income—which often had a similar effect as segregation by race—the legacy of Buchanan v. Warley cannot be overstated.
First, it pioneered the use of carefully constructed cause-oriented litigation to achieve a just result.
Second, it demonstrated the powerful connection between private property rights and the rest of our constitutionally protected rights. While the Supreme Court at the time was unwilling to strike down Jim Crow laws, it was willing to halt segregation when it had obvious and negative impacts on private property rights.
And lastly, it gave rise to a new legal specialty—public interest litigation where groups like the NAACP, the ACLU, and later Pacific Legal Foundation were able to vindicate constitutional rights for all Americans.
Warley might not have known the lasting impact his case would have for the nation, but he understood that the fight for civil rights, at its core, is a fight for property rights.
The Supreme Court’s prejudice in the early 1900s forced the parties of Buchanan v. Warley to battle Louisville’s segregated law using property rights arguments, but property rights’ importance in the fight for freedom and equality is why they were ultimately successful.
William Warley’s fire for fighting injustice burned hot his entire life. But he never forgot Mr. Mclellan’s lesson: Passionately fighting for your rights is always the right thing to do, but fighting intelligently—and achieving results—is the most important.