A gentlemen`s agreement, or gentleman`s agreement, is an informal and legally non-binding agreement between two or more parties. It is usually oral, but it can be written or simply understood as part of a tacit agreement by convention or by mutually beneficial label. The essence of a gentlemen`s agreement is that it depends on the honour of the parties for its achievement, rather than being enforceable in one way or another. It differs from a legal agreement or a contract. Gentlemen`s agreements were a widespread discriminatory tactic, which would have been more common than restrictive alliances to maintain the homogeneity of upper-class neighborhoods and suburbs in the United States. [17] The nature of these agreements made it extremely difficult to prove or follow them, and they were long after the U.S. Supreme Court decisions in Shelley/. Kraemer and Barrows v. Jackson.
[17] A source indicates that the gentlemen`s agreements are “probably still in place” but that their use has declined sharply. [17] Until Jackie Robinson was hired by the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1946, a gentlemen`s agreement ensured that African-American players were excluded from organized baseball. [18] An intense anti-Japanese atmosphere developed on the west coast. U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt did not want to anger Japan by passing laws banning Japanese immigration to the United States, as had happened with Chinese immigration. Instead, there was an informal “gentlemen`s agreement” (1907-1908) between the United States and Japan, in which Japan ensured that there was little or no movement in the United States. The agreements were concluded by U.S. Secretary of State Elihu Root and Japanese Secretary of State Tadasu Hayashi.
The agreement banned the emigration of Japanese workers to the United States and repealed the order of segregation of the San Francisco School Board in California, which had humiliated and angered the Japanese. The agreement did not apply to the territory of Hawaii, which was then treated as separate and separate from the United States. The agreements remained in effect until 1924, when Congress banned all immigration from Japan. [11] Similar anti-Japanese sentiments in Canada led simultaneously to Hayashi Lemieux`s agreement, also known as the Gentlemen`s Agreement of 1908, with substantially similar clauses and effects.