Arc of the Covenants

THE FXBG ADVANCE FRIDAY 8/7/26 MIDDAY READ

By Michael O’Keefe, ADVANCE CONTRIBUTOR

Leo Sacchi/Pexels

The United States Supreme Court in the 1948 landmark case Shelley v. Kraemer ruled that race-based restrictive covenants in real estate matters are unconstitutional under the Equal Protection Clause found in the 14^th Amendment of the United States Constitution. In a separate case later, the Supreme Court ruled that religion-based restrictive covenants also are unconstitutional under the Equal Protection Clause.

But that didn’t stop the Commonwealth of Virginia from practicing institutional racism and religious bigotry by allowing recordation of residential subdivision plats with race-based and religion-based restrictive covenants. Such covenants expressly forbade occupancy by non-white and Jewish families in neighborhoods like the one where I grew up during the 1960s about three miles north of Mount Vernon along the George Washington Memorial Parkway.

These Supreme Court mandates also didn’t stop my family and neighbors from practicing their own style of white-Christian-privilege-based racial and religious discrimination. The bottom-line collective flawed wisdom in my neighborhood was clear:

No Blacks or Jews Allowed.

I suspect that modern day Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion haters look at each other and wink when they claim that institutional racism and religious bigotry no longer exist in America. My parents and neighbors probably winked, too, when they enforced those racial and religious based covenants, perhaps reassuring each other that it was about preserving property values and had nothing to do with racial prejudice and religious bigotry.

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I made a new friend at the start of sixth grade in 1967. He was smart and kind, but what really stood out about Peter was his self-depreciating sense of humor. I understood even then that he was an old soul.

Raised Catholic, I knew something about souls, and about conscience. The concept of examining my conscience and striving to be a better human being resonated with me as a child who received rigorous catechism instruction. This concept resonates with me still.

My friendship with Peter grew in the usual manner that Fall. We ate lunch together in the school cafeteria, and often we worked together on classroom and homework projects. We played the games kids play together, and we visited each other’s homes and met each other’s families.

The abrupt termination of my friendship with Peter was triggered by my answer to a seemingly innocent question posed at the dinner table by my father: “What is Peter’s last name?” When I answered, anger arose crimson in my father’s complexion and in the volume of his voice. I learned that Peter was a Jew and that Jews were filthy. Innocently, I explained that Peter took baths like everyone else, but my father took that as back-talk.

Peter lived about ten blocks from our house, and, unfortunately, next door to a family that previously had been our next-door neighbors. They were Catholic too. The man of the house, a WWII Air Force veteran, had been shot down from his B-17 bomber over Germany in 1943 and spent almost two years nearly starving to death in Stalag 17B. You would think that he might have had some empathy for Jewish people due to his concentration camp-like experiences. Apparently not, considering the urgent call he placed to my father after seeing me one day playing with Peter.

A wildfire of phone calls among the neighbors soon ignited a campaign to investigate why our school principal had failed to inform parents that a Jewish child was attending our school. That led to the termination of the lease that had brought Peter’s family, in violation of those unconstitutional restrictive covenants, into our neighborhood. Peter and his family were evicted from their rental home.

I aged out of our neighborhood elementary school, and the following year attended a regional junior high school. I rode a bus to school for the first time and attended school with black kids, another first. On the playgrounds, basketball courts, and baseball fields, I had fun playing with them and gave no thought to race as a friendship factor. That changed when I invited several of my new school friends to play basketball on the basketball court in my neighborhood.

My father saw us playing together on the basketball court when he drove past on his way home from work that afternoon. He hopped out of his car and sent everyone home. Later, he instructed me to tell my new school friends that no one from outside our neighborhood could use our neighborhood facilities. “Blacks are animals,” he said.

In my heart and conscience, I knew that racial and religious bigotry were not simply wrong but also evil. Still, I grew into manhood in a house, in a neighborhood, in a country, and in a world where such bigotry was so widespread that there seemed to be little apparent shame in its practice. This realization troubled me, yet I often found myself forgiving family, friends, and acquaintances for their bigotry. I told myself that they didn’t really mean what they said, and that my passive tolerance was not enabling this bigotry.

In late August of 1971, when I was a rising junior in high school, a priest who had been a long-term friend of our family and athletic director at my school—where my father was varsity basketball coach—arrived uninvited at our home with two 12-year-old black boys from one of the poorest neighborhoods in Philadelphia. My parents were apoplectic, yet unable to dissuade the priest from his request for shelter for the night. My father instructed me to take the two boys to the basketball court a block away while he continued arguing with the priest. We heard their raised voices the entire way as the three of us walked silently to the court, which was located next to our neighborhood swimming pool.

We bonded as kids do over sports and, even though I was four years older, we enjoyed playing together. A few of my neighborhood friends showed up, and we played pickup basketball in the late summer heat and humidity for over an hour. Then, we stood in a lengthy line at the refrigerated water fountain inside the pool clubhouse, and afterwards we took a dip in the pool.

I didn’t realize—until every single swimmer other than our group jumped out of the pool the second we dove in—that my two new pals from Philly were the first black people to ever swim there. A phone call must have alerted my father, because soon he was herding the three of us out the pool clubhouse door. Not a single person re-entered the pool. I learned later that they closed it for cleaning until the following day.

I also flashed back to the water fountain—how several people had stepped in behind my new friends and I momentarily before abandoning the line. I had thought they peeled away due to the length of the line, but I learned later that the pool managers put an “Out of service” sign on the water fountain until after it was thoroughly sanitized.

A tension-filled night followed. I slept upstairs in the heat of my fan-only attic bedroom. The boys and the priest slept on recliners and a couch in our basement. My eerily silent parents, and my two sisters, slept in their bedrooms on the floor in between.

The priest and boys were gone before sunrise, and my parents never again discussed the events of that weekend. I imagined that the priest had known my father’s views about black people, and that he had been practicing some sort of confrontational religious battle tactics by showing up uninvited at our door.

Years later, I read in the Washington Post that the priest had been sued in civil court for sexual acts involving young black male intercity children he had fostered. I was a lawyer by then, and curiosity led me to access the case files via a legal research database. After reading the legal opinion issued by the judge in the case, I also read the depositions of the two victims. They described sexual assaults that occurred during a weekend trip to a house in Virginia, the details of which clearly described my basement and the events of that long-ago weekend.

Decades later, I accepted my seriously ill father into my home and helped him die with dignity across the next 18 months. Caring for him required significant caregiver help. He complained bitterly, initially, when a person of color came to the house as a caregiver or to provide medical aid. His continuing racism and purposeful myopia to the kind nature of his caregivers truly bothered me.

So, when twice-weekly, I took him to Mass across those 18 months, I used the opportunity to coax him into examining his conscience about his racial bias. During the car rides to and from church, we had many talks about how God views people of color—the same loving way He views everyone. This continued until one day my father had an epiphany, and told me that Blacks and Hispanics were people too, just like anyone else.

I like to think that my dad’s late-in-life encounters with those he had always hated from afar—his caregivers and medical aides—had opened his heart in some fundamental ways, and that truth had finally trumped ignorance and hate. My father held onto his epiphany, choosing love over hate, until the moment of his death, which was nothing short of miraculous.

The thought makes me smile, and gives me hope for this crazy world to think that my father died just one miracle short of sainthood.

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Michael O’Keefe spent his early adult years working for the Metropolitan Police Department in Washington, D.C. and the Fairfax County Police Department. On-duty injuries sent him to college and law school. He practiced law locally and is now retired and living in Spotsylvania County.