ABSTRACT
The US Supreme Court's decision in Buchanan v. Warley, 245 US 60 (1917), marked one of the first successful attacks on segregationist policies in the United States. Its outcome, however, was based on libertarian respect for property rights rather than on a desire to ensure that all citizens received the equal protection of the laws, a right protected by the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. William Warley, the president of the Louisville, Kentucky, chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), contracted with Charles Buchanan, a white real estate agent, to buy a residential lot. In the wake of the Buchanan decision, the NAACP successfully used the Supreme Court's libertarian "de-fense of property rights" argument to overturn similar segregationist housing ordinances in other cities, though some cities continued to pass racial zoning ordinances until the 1940s.
