Although this case does not deal directly with racially restrictive covenants or neighborhood agreements, it was referred to by attorneys defending black property owners whose ownership to purchase property was contested because of their race. This case was used as a precedent in a defense that certain covenants in property ownership contracts, were capricious and exceeded reasonable fairness and were therefore unlawful. I have not yet seen any cases in Michigan where use of this precedent was successful in defending black property purchasers during the Jim Crow era. Specific cases in which this precedent/argument was used are Sipes v McGee and Porter v Barrett. Although unsuccessful in the end result, the use of this argument gives a glimpse into the direction of legal defenders of property ownership as a civil right were thinking.
This case dealt with the transfer of property titles from one owner to another. In this example, a Detroit landowner created an extremely complex will that provided for the sale and distribution of his property upon his death. The document contained some very questionable restrictive clauses that revealed his attempt to control his wife's property ownership and re-marriage rights after his death. It also revealed his distrust of one of his sons and his attempt to restrict inheritance by any of this son's children. The intent and wording concerning these capricious directives in his property deed created more unanswerable problems than solutions. Also, the fact that McDonnell, the original property owner, stipulated that trustees he had assigned in his will were to execute his demands postmortem, further complicated the conundrum. One of these trustees died before McDonnell and the other was unwilling to act in this role when the time came.
Executors (assigned trustees) of the will became complainants, and the heirs became defendants in this case where heirs attempted to take possession of the land that the will designated to them under the very restrictive conditions. At the Michigan Supreme court, the justice overruled a lower court decision that would have prevented the heirs from owning their fathers land because they had attempted to sell parts of the land to family members before Mrs. McDonnell's death (and with her consent), rather than comply with the restrictive conditions in the will that the land be sold by trustees. The justice decided in favor of the original defendants and that the exclusionary clauses as interpreted by the lower court were unenforceable, violating the original intent of the landowner.
One of the revealing ideas I realized after long hours of untangling the nuances of the case came from the resulting opinion written by the Michigan Supreme Court Justice. As he describes the logic for his decision, what became apparent to me was the centrality of land or property ownership to the concept of civil and citizenship rights. It was especially poignant to read his reference to Medieval European philosophy as the origin of American belief on this topic.
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