Description
The four square-style house at 4626 SeeBaldt (just northwest of I-96 and Tireman) played a critical role in the repeal of race-based restrictive covenants in property deeds.
The desegregation of court. American society was achieved not through government action but through the determination of the progressives willing to put their lives at risk by challenging restrictive covenants in court. In Detroit. In Detroit, Orsel and Minnie McGhee paid the price, and won the victories, that eventually broke the stranglehold of the institutionalized racism in housing.
Orsel McGhee, a press operator for the Detroit Free Press, and his wife Minnie, a postal worker, rented the house for a decade during the depression and tried to purchase it. The block club sued to remove the McGhee family during World War II. By 1948 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against restrictive covenants based on the McGhee lawsuit and another similar case from St. Louis. Attorney Thurgood Marshall was one of the attorneys for the McGhee's.
The movie The Color of Courage was based on the McGhee's landmark civil rights case Sipes vs. McGhee,
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0158962/