In 1948 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that covenants prohibiting the sale of houses to indi- viduals of certain races or ethnicities could not be enforced. Two years later, Dr. Robert Deane became the first African American to purchase a house in Mount Pleasant that carried the old covenant. But it wasn’t easy. The Deanes bought 1841 Park Road from Lillian Kraemer Curry. Curry had inherited the house, built in 1906, from her father Charles Kraemer, a German immigrant wine and spirits merchant. In the 1920s the all-white Mount Pleasant Citizens Association began promoting a covenant binding homeowners never to sell their houses to “negroes.” Kraemer and most of his neighbors signed it. Even though the Supreme Court had outlawed this practice when Kraemer’s daughter sold the house to the prominent black gynecologist in 1950, a small group of neighbors sued to stop the sale based on the old covenant. The neighbors lost in court, and Dr. Deane owned the house until his death in 2001. Although 1841 remained a single-family home, beginning in the 1930s housing shortages and tight budgets led some families to take in boarders. During the 1950s, Malvina Brown’s Armenian- born parents rented rooms in their Park Road home to newcomers from Greece, Mexico, Turkey, and Venezuela. As you continue to Sign 12, notice the Kensington tonalite wall in front of 1833 and the Potomac bluestone wall in front of 1827 Park Road. Both locally quarried stones are found in walls and buildings throughout the city. Defying the Restrictive Covenants park road between 18th and 19th streets nw
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