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Bradley, Mark Philip --- "The United States and Global Human Rights Imagination of the 1940s" [2012] ELECD 290; in Porsdam, Helle (ed), "Civil Religion, Human Rights and International Relations" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2012)

Book Title: Civil Religion, Human Rights and International Relations

Editor(s): Porsdam, Helle

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781781000519

Section: Chapter 7

Section Title: The United States and Global Human Rights Imagination of the 1940s

Author(s): Bradley, Mark Philip

Number of pages: 18

Extract:

7. The United States and global human
rights imagination of the 1940s
Mark Philip Bradley

In the spring of 1946, Orsel and Minnie McGhee turned to the Detroit
Branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored
Persons (NAACP) for some help. A group of white property owners in
northwestern Detroit had gone to the Circuit Court for Wayne County to
oust the McGhees, who were African-American, from the home that they
had purchased some 10 years earlier. The case rested on a racially restrictive
covenant adopted by white homeowners that no property in the neighbor-
hood `shall be used or occupied by any persons except those of the
Caucasian race'. Among the signatures on the covenant were those of the
white couple who had sold their home to the McGhees. Two Detroit-based
African-American attorneys, both members of the NAACP's National
Legal Committee, took the case. The Circuit Court ruled against the
McGhees.1
The McGhee's attorneys appealed their case to the Supreme Court of
Michigan. In Sipes v McGhee, their appellant brief emphasized the ways in
which the lower court ruling was contrary to what they termed `sound
public policy'. To support this argument, the brief gave sustained attention
to the decision of the neighboring Ontario High Court In re Drummond
Wren which refused to enforce a restrictive covenant against Jews as it
violated the human rights provisions of the United Nations Charter which
Canada had recently ratified. The relevance of the opinion ...