The Origins of the Fair
Housing Act of 1968
With the passage of Title VIII of the Civil Rights Act of 1968, better known as the Fair Housing Act, a decades-long struggle to end racial injustice in American housing came to a triumphant climax. In the first part of the twentieth century, civil rights activists successfully fought to ban racial zoning and eliminate racially restrictive covenants. Advocates for fair housing then took on the federal government’s policies that fostered racial segregation, especially those of the Federal Housing Administration (FHA). They built a movement, starting in New York City, with the five-year long campaign to desegregate Stuyvesant Town, a large publicly subsidized privately developed urban redevelopment project. Out of that effort came the National Committee Against Discrimination in Housing (NCDH), which in turn encouraged fair housing campaigns and legislation in dozens of states and towns across the country.
In the 1960s, fair housing advocates set their sights on a national prohibition on discrimination in all housing, public and private, on the basis of race, creed, or national origin. They successfully pressured President John Kennedy to issue an executive order to that end in late 1962, but it was far more limited than they had hoped. Then, in the midst of civil rights ferment and urban uprisings of the late 1960s, many reformers began to see predominantly African American urban neighborhoods as pathological places that fostered poverty and violence. In arguing for the passage of the Fair Housing Act, liberals in Congress explained that the law was necessary to rescue African Americans from such “racial ghettos.”
Activists expanded their goals from simply banning discriminatory practices to breaking up these “racial ghettos” and integrating neighborhoods throughout metropolitan areas. Although its proponents insisted that the Fair Housing Act was necessary to eliminate the ghetto, the majority of its provisions targeted discrimination in real estate transactions. The complex factors, from exclusionary zoning to socioeconomic inequality to household preferences for particular neighborhood characteristics, that shape settlement patterns and that reproduce racial segregation make the prospects for widely integrated neighborhoods unclear, even with the newer Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) Rule. Although the introduction to this volume has already noted some of the key historical themes and precedents, some additional aspects of this history are worth recounting to explain the struggle and potential of the quest to further fair housing.
Public and Private Segregation and Its Early Opponents
During the early decades of the twentieth century, more than a million African Americans moved from the rural South to America’s urban centers in what has come to be known as “the Great Migration.” In the great cities of the nation, many of the new arrivals clustered in central locations, helping create neighborhoods with high concentrations of Black residents—greater than the proportion of foreign-born groups in their respective immigrant quarters, and longer lasting. The most important cause of highly concentrated Black settlement patterns was white people’s hostility to their presence. Whites’ antagonism toward Blacks was frequently organized and at times violent. Dozens of African Americans died at the hands of whites in ugly mob actions, the most notorious of which occurred in Chicago and East St. Louis in 1919 and Detroit in 1925 but which persisted into the mid-twentieth century.1
Whites took many other measures short of violence to prevent African Americans from living among them. White real estate brokers and lenders frequently would not serve Black customers, property managers of white-occupied apartment buildings refused to rent to Blacks, homebuilders rarely built houses for African Americans, and white homeowners often would not sell their homes to African Americans. Several city governments passed racial zoning ordinances. After the Supreme Court ruled racial zoning unconstitutional in 1917, white real estate developers and homeowners who wanted to prevent African Americans from moving to their neighborhoods shifted strategies. They drew up private agreements requiring that all neighborhood residents would not sell or rent their property to Negroes. These racially restrictive covenants, which were also used against Jews and other unwanted population groups, took the form of either attachments to property deeds or agreements between fellow property owners.2
Formed in 1909 to end racial discrimination in America, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) first campaigned against racial zoning and then during the 1940s spearheaded the fight against racial covenants. Under its founder Thurgood Marshall, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund pursued two basic lines of legal attack. First, its attorneys recognized the validity of racial covenants as voluntary private agreements but opposed their enforcement by the courts as unconstitutionally discriminatory “state action” similar to racial zoning laws.3 Second, they argued that the covenants were inimical to a sound public policy by presenting sociological evidence that covenants forced African Americans to live in substandard racial ghettos—a term that several authors used to evoke the Jewish ghettos in Europe organized and enforced by the Nazis.4
In May 1948, the Supreme Court heard two racial covenant cases grouped together, McGhee v. Sipes and Shelley v. Kraemer, and ruled against enforcement of racially restrictive covenants. The court affirmed the state action theory that the NAACP had argued and held that the state courts’ upholding of these restrictive covenants deprived the Black plaintiffs of their property rights in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment’s prohibition against a state’s denying any person within its territory equal protection under the laws.5
At the same time as opponents of housing discrimination challenged court enforcement of private restrictive covenants, they also knew that government housing agencies were themselves directly engaged in forms of discriminatory state action. The nation’s public housing program, created in the 1930s, blatantly enforced segregation of the races in the great majority of public housing projects. The United States Housing Authority (USHA) had established a Racial Relations Service, but despite being staffed by such integrationists as Frank S. Horne, it had done little to integrate public housing.6
Several factors inhibited officials from integrating government-sponsored public housing projects. In the segregated South, public housing was politically popular, but to local officials, integration of housing projects was unthinkable.7 In the North, the situation was not much better. In Chicago, Elizabeth Wood, the liberal executive secretary of the Chicago Housing Authority, tried to place small numbers of Blacks in new, predominantly white public housing in the central city and on the city’s outskirts, but even this limited policy provoked massive white violence in 1946 and 1947. Wood then lost a struggle with the city council over the location of a host of new public housing projects, after which Blacks were largely constrained to public housing projects in Black neighborhoods.8
The public housing movement bequeathed several leaders to the effort to prohibit housing discrimination, the most prominent of whom were Robert C. Weaver and Charles Abrams. As a member of the “Black Cabinet” in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration, Weaver had held several federal government positions, including special assistant in the public housing division of the Works Progress Administration (WPA). In 1948, he published The Negro Ghetto, a seminal work on the problem of discrimination, and in 1965, President Lyndon Johnson appointed him to be the first secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). A lawyer by profession, Abrams in 1933 helped draft legislation to establish the New York City Housing Authority and then served as that public housing body’s counsel. In the 1950s, he became the first chairman of the New York State Commission against Discrimination. During his long career, Abrams not only applied his legal expertise to solving housing and civil rights issues but also wrote prolifically to sway public opinion on these matters.9
As veterans of the public housing movement, such opponents of housing discrimination usually did not dwell on the sins of the public housing program, which was a key component of liberals’ postwar policy agenda. Instead, they saved their wrath for the FHA, the federal government agency established in 1935 to insure mortgage loans and promote single-family homeownership. Supporters of public housing reviled the FHA as a rival to their own program and a tool of the private housing industry, which they blamed for creating the nation’s slums and then doing nothing to provide homes to low-income people.10
For their part, civil rights advocates denounced the FHA for aggressively pursuing a policy of containment of African Americans in the ghetto. For years, FHA regulators encouraged the use of racially restrictive covenants. Even after the Supreme Court’s decision, agency officials believed that Shelley did not prevent them from honoring mortgages on covenanted properties. Moreover, the FHA’s underwriting manual specifically warned against insuring loans to Blacks or to owners in racially mixed neighborhoods. In the view of Abrams, the FHA’s “racial policy . . . could well have been culled from the [Nazi] Nuremburg laws.”11
After the Shelley decision, the NAACP applied intensive pressure on the FHA to modify its policies. Walter White, the chief executive of the NAACP, protested personally to President Harry Truman. Marshall met repeatedly with the solicitor general to submit drafts of revised FHA regulations and sternly lectured FHA officials against following local segregation customs. In 1947, the agency finally agreed to delete offending references to race in its underwriting manual, but not until late 1949 did it agree to deny insurance to mortgages with racial covenants. Even so, the FHA continued to encourage development of suburbs, such as Westlake in Daly City, California, and Levittown, Pennsylvania, that were closed to African Americans. Under presidents Kennedy and Johnson, the FHA gradually improved, but in the late 1960s, the agency was still approving segregated developments and working with developers and owners who discriminated against Blacks.12
The Legacy of Stuyvesant Town
In New York City, a long campaign to desegregate the pioneer urban redevelopment project Stuyvesant Town led to the founding of the first organizations dedicated specifically to eliminating discrimination in housing. With support from Robert Moses, New York’s controversial urban-planning power broker, the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company initiated the Stuyvesant Town project in 1943. The project enraged liberal public housing supporters because it forcibly removed low-income families without rehousing them and used public money (in the form of tax exemptions) to support a private real-estate venture. Worst of all, the rental policy for the new project blatantly banned minorities.13 Outraged civil rights and public housing advocates enlisted many liberal organizations, including the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the NAACP, and the American Jewish Congress, to fight to integrate Stuyvesant Town. Eventually, in January 1952, Metropolitan Life succumbed to the pressure and adopted a non-discriminatory rental policy.14
Although the anti-discrimination forces had won a great moral victory, the new rental policy had little effect. Relatively few African Americans moved to Stuyvesant Town, mainly because few applied for admittance: low incomes and long waiting lists for apartments deterred many, and a reluctance to endure expected white hostility no doubt kept others away. However, the battle to integrate Stuyvesant Town had profound effects beyond the boundaries of the housing project. In 1948, the representatives of sixteen groups involved in the campaign organized the New York State Committee on Discrimination in Housing to agitate for fair housing. The new organization sponsored path-breaking legislation in the city and the state that made it illegal to discriminate in publicly aided and private housing developments.15
After the passage of the Housing Act of 1949, the members of the New York State Committee on Discrimination in Housing saw the potential for action on a national scale and, in 1950, founded a new organization, the National Committee Against Discrimination in Housing (NCDH) to coordinate activities in the cause of what was originally called “democratic housing” but soon became known as either open or fair housing. Until its demise in 1987, the NCDH was the only national organization dedicated to wiping out racial discrimination in the housing field. Fittingly enough, Weaver and Abrams, two old friends and leaders in the struggles against restrictive covenants and Stuyvesant Town, served as the first president and vice president of the NCDH.16
First Steps toward Fair Housing
The NCDH focused on fighting discrimination rather than the patterns of racial change in neighborhoods, a far more complex phenomenon. As the author of a 1960 report funded by the Ford Foundation explained, eliminating discriminatory conduct would be easier and more effective than trying to change prejudiced attitudes, and changing laws was the most effective way to change conduct and the factors that encouraged prejudiced attitudes. Hence, the NCDH drafted model anti-discrimination laws for cities and states and lobbied the federal Housing and Home Finance Agency (HHFA) to encourage open or nondiscriminatory occupancy policies in new FHA-supported private housing and all public housing. In the private sphere, it worked with local interracial housing committees in Norfolk and Minneapolis and campaigned to get developers to sell homes to African Americans. After a decade of work, advocates of “open housing,” a term that evoked unrestricted real estate markets, could point to thirty-two cities and ten states that had prohibited discrimination in government-supported developments.17
By 1960, the anti-housing discrimination advocates had begun to make headway in reforming private real-estate activity. The growing civil rights movement raised the consciousness of many white Americans and spurred ordinary citizens to form fair housing committees in hundreds of communities across the United States. Some committees encouraged local governments to bar discrimination and invited African Americans to move to their communities, although as a practical matter in affluent suburbs, such as Boston’s Natick and Wellesley, Blacks were unlikely to come in significant numbers. An increasing number of states and cities passed anti-discrimination laws. In one of those states, New Jersey, representatives of local organizations formed a New Jersey Committee against Discrimination and, with the aid and advice of the NCDH, mounted a publicity and legal campaign against developer William Levitt, who notoriously had refused to sell to Blacks, that forced him to reverse policy and sell to non-whites. Such decentralized local efforts multiplied during the civil rights era, so that on the eve of the passage of the Fair Housing Act of 1968, the NCDH counted twenty-one states, the District of Columbia, five counties, and seventy-five cities and villages that had enacted open housing statutes.18
Beyond its encouragement of local endeavors, the NCDH relentlessly pursued federal policies that would end discrimination. During the 1960 U.S. presidential campaign, the NCDH persuaded both parties to adopt open housing planks. Candidate Kennedy raised the hopes of public housing and civil rights advocates when he promised that if elected, he would outlaw housing discrimination by federal agencies with a “stroke of a pen.” After the election, however, frustration set in when it became clear that the new president was in no hurry to issue an executive order. Abrams, recently installed as the president of the NCDH, helpfully sent Kennedy a sweeping draft order that would have banned discrimination in all forms of federally assisted housing and all federally regulated and assisted lending institutions, but to no avail.
The hopes of the advocates were raised again when, at year’s end, Kennedy nominated Weaver, the NCDH’s former president, to head the federal HHFA. Yet the president, wary of political repercussions, refused to act on the executive order to prohibit housing discrimination by federal agencies. Abrams initiated a national lobbying effort to force the president’s hand. Finally, in the fall of 1962, Kennedy issued a limited order that directed all federal departments, but particularly the HHFA, “to take all action necessary and appropriate to prevent discrimination because of race, color, creed, or national origin” in any housing the government owned, financed, or supported through loan insurance, in the future. Needless to say, open housing advocates were highly disappointed.19
Changing Perceptions of the Ghetto
By the mid-1960s, the social and political context of the movement to end housing discrimination had begun to change. The northern and urban migrations of African Americans had slowed to a virtual halt. Large numbers of whites continued to move from city neighborhoods into the suburbs, opening large new territories in which Black people could settle.
The transition process, however, created dual real estate markets in which demand for homes in old neighborhoods was low among whites and high among African Americans. Unscrupulous real estate agents and investors, known as “blockbusters,” exploited this situation by scaring whites into selling homes at discount prices in “changing neighborhoods” and then charging high prices to Blacks to purchase such houses, a practice sometimes made worse by requiring the onerous contract method of sale. Although widely condemned for causing wholesale racial change, blockbusters were a symptom, not a cause, of the discriminatory real estate market. Hence, the NCDH’s leaders believed that such exploitation constituted not civil rights violations but fraud and worried that trying to suppress it might prevent Blacks from purchasing homes in previously white neighborhoods.20
As African Americans spread across the cities and into the inner suburbs, their accommodations improved. Density levels and the number of substandard dwellings dropped; gone were the desperately tight housing market, overcrowding, and kitchenette apartments of the early postwar years. In many cities, the degree of urban segregation actually declined.21
As middle-class African Americans departed for middle-class districts, the proportion of low-income, unemployed, and single-parent households living in predominantly African American central-city areas increased. Crime rates, which rose throughout the country during the 1960s, escalated dramatically in the core areas of large cities. Just as the southern civil rights movement triumphed with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, violent disorders broke out in the Hough neighborhood of Cleveland and New York City’s Harlem, followed by four years of similar upheavals in African American neighborhoods throughout the nation. The urban unrest, poverty, and rising crime rates convinced many observers that the nation’s cities were in crisis. In response, scholars, civil rights advocates, and journalists launched a harsh attack on what they called “the racial ghetto” and redefined the goals of the fair housing movement. Since the 1940s, urban sociologists and civil rights activists had invoked the term “ghetto” to emphasize the injustice of housing discrimination, noting the correlation of overcrowded slums with social problems.22
Now, influenced by theories of a self-perpetuating “culture of poverty,” scholars and reformers conceived of the ghetto as an oppressive place that inflicted poverty, dangerous housing, inferior schools, chiseling storekeepers, and brutal police upon its inhabitants. People who lived in such neighborhoods, according to studies of urban social pathology, faced almost insurmountable barriers to finding jobs or experiencing stable social lives. To such observers, the color gap in wealth seemed to be widening instead of narrowing as America’s inner cities dissolved into a tangle of poverty, drugs, violence, and defeatism.23
In 1965, Kenneth Clark published Dark Ghetto: Dilemmas of Social Power, perhaps the most eloquent and influential expression of this concept of the ghetto as a source of social ills. Based on his experience with the government-funded Harlem Youth Opportunities Unlimited program, Dark Ghetto was not so much a report as an “anguished cry.”24 In it, Clark spells out the social problems he saw facing African Americans: “low aspiration, poor education, family instability, illegitimacy, unemployment, crime, drug addiction and alcoholism, frequent illness and early death.” An internalized sense of inferior racial status with its attendant despair and hatred, he adds, aggravated the problems of urban poverty.25
A primary source of these social problems, Clark strongly believes, was the physical environment that hemmed in its inhabitants behind an “invisible wall.” “The pathologies of the ghetto community,” he writes, “perpetuate themselves through cumulative ugliness, deterioration, and isolation.” Echoing anti-slum reformers of the early twentieth century, Clark charges that unsafe, deteriorating, and overcrowded housing was killing off the residents of Harlem.26 During the mid-1960s, many politically liberal Americans, including the president of the United States, adopted the view that the isolation of the ghetto interlocked with past injustice and present prejudice to harm African Americans in complex and profound ways. As Congress debated the Voting Rights Act of 1965, President Johnson echoed Clark in a speech at Howard University in which he described African Americans as “a separated people” in “a world of decay ringed by an invisible wall.”27
To Break Up the Racial Ghetto
In the ferment over civil rights and the inner city, the open housing reformers widened the scope of their agenda beyond simply ending discriminatory practices; they wished to eliminate that invisible wall altogether. In 1965, the NCDH launched a nationwide campaign for open occupancy that deliberately moved “beyond the issue of discrimination per se to those broad social, economic, and political factors which support and extend the ghetto walls.” That October, the NCDH organized a national conference, attended by participants from 132 cities and 32 states, on the theme of “How to Break Up the Racial Ghetto.”28 The following year, the NCDH participated in the White House Conference on Civil Rights and helped draft and then promoted housing goals, such as building low-cost housing in suburbs and developing racially inclusive new towns, that went further than merely removing barriers to free selection of housing.29
Yet for all their dislike of the ghetto, open housing leaders overestimated the value that many African American residents of inner-city neighborhoods placed on racial integration. The NCDH’s own newsletter in 1963 summarized a Philadelphia study that found that when choosing a home, most African Americans unsurprisingly looked first for good-quality housing and neighborhood amenities. “Integration as such,” the study concluded, “was a secondary consideration.”30 In 1964, a study of middle-class Black families dislocated by urban renewal projects in Boston found that almost all had moved to other predominantly Black neighborhoods, most often because they liked the inexpensive housing there and wanted to be near friends and relatives. “Negroes do not move [out of Black neighborhoods],” one African American woman displaced by urban renewal explained, “because they feel more comfortable with other Negroes.” Whether this sentiment was widespread or not, it indicated that some Blacks did not consider living in integrated neighborhoods to be their highest priority.31
In New York City, where almost all homes were covered by extensive fair housing laws, open housing advocates ran a massive educational program from 1964 to 1965 to “convince Negroes that good housing is also integrated housing.” After fifteen months of trying to help minority households obtain housing in predominantly white neighborhoods, however, “Operation Open City” could only point to eighty families who had found “mainstream” homes. African Americans were reluctant to move to predominantly white neighborhoods for many reasons—including costs of housing, desire to be near family and friends, and/or the expectation of white hostility—which complicated the task of integrating urban neighborhoods beyond what reformers usually thought was necessary.32
Chicago 1966
The Chicago Freedom Movement, a coalition led by Dr. Martin Luther King, also discovered the difficulties of trying to transform urban dwelling patterns. In 1966, as the sense of “urban crisis” deepened, King and other leaders of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) came to Chicago to begin the northern drive of the civil rights movement and chose to make housing their central issue. The Chicago Freedom Movement absorbed the anti-ghetto principles of the open housing movement. “To wipe out slums, ghettos, and racism,” the leaders declared, “we must create an open city with equal opportunities and equal results.”33
Following the precepts of open housing advocates, the Chicago Freedom Movement’s leaders declared that particular agents—slumlords, real estate brokers, savings and loan associations, the Chicago Housing Authority—were orchestrating the city’s segregated residential patterns. By staging anti-discrimination demonstrations, the leaders hoped to pressure Chicago’s mayor, Richard J. Daley, and the city’s other powerbrokers to order the agents of segregation to cease and desist.34
The housing campaign, however, did not turn out as planned. The Chicago Freedom Movement held prayer vigils and marches in the city’s all-white communities. In working-class white neighborhoods, such as Gage Park, they were confronted not by real estate agents and lenders but by mobs of stone-throwing whites whose hostility surpassed anything that the veterans of the civil rights movement had ever encountered in response to their demonstrations. The marches generated little support. The city’s newspapers, which had originally greeted King warmly, soured on the campaign, and few residents of Chicago’s Black neighborhoods responded. That August, at a summit meeting with the mayor, city officials, and real estate executives, the civil rights leaders won only token concessions to their demands for open housing.35
One of the agreements the Chicago Freedom Movement’s leaders obtained was the establishment of an open housing service, which would aim to place a thousand racial minority families in white communities throughout the Chicago area. As with New York’s “Open City” campaign, however, the program did not reach its ambitious goals. The service encountered many obstacles, including not only the difficulty of finding white landlords willing to rent or sell to Blacks but also low levels of interest among Chicago’s African Americans in moving to white neighborhoods. The housing service’s African American staff members encountered resistance from Black Chicagoans to the idea of moving out of their neighborhoods, including residents who believed that the program was a scheme to dilute Blacks’ political strength. Moreover, a majority of the applicants to the housing service, according to social scientist Brian J. L. Berry, were more interested in finding decent housing than in moving to integrated neighborhoods—and more than a third of them were content to live in predominantly Black neighborhoods. After a year of operation in a city with three hundred thousand Black households, the service had placed only 46 of 537 applicants, and of these only about 15 had moved to all-white communities. In the end, embattled working-class communities, such as Gage Park and Cicero—not to mention wealthy North Shore suburbs, such as Winnetka—remained lily white.36 Although the Chicago campaign had more lasting success on the legal front with the Gautreaux cases filed in 1966, it would take thirty years of struggle to carry out these court orders. Meanwhile, Chicago remained one of the nation’s most highly segregated cities.37
The Black Power Challenge to Housing Integration
In the late 1960s, the open housing movement began to face a formidable challenge from an array of civil rights leaders, policy makers, and intellectuals who disavowed the anti-ghetto policies of the open housing crusade and expressed instead a strong sense of racial solidarity among African Americans and an emphasis on empowering predominantly Black neighborhoods. Within the civil rights movement, the rising popularity of the idea of Black Power challenged the fundamentally integrationist principles of open housing. Inspired in part by Malcolm X and frustrated by the failure of Democratic Party to seat the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party at the 1964 National Convention, Stokely Carmichael, a freedom rider and leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), began to rally support for a Black Power philosophy that helped precipitate a split between the increasingly militant and Black nationalist groups, such as SNCC and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), and the more moderate and integrationist organizations, such as SCLC and the NAACP.
Black Power advocates rejected the notion that Blacks had to live in white neighborhoods to improve their lives. As Carmichael said, “We were never fighting for the right to integrate, we were fighting against white supremacy.” In Chicago, supporters of Black Power opposed King’s leadership of the Chicago Freedom Movement and the goal of an open city by appealing to the reluctance of Blacks to move to white neighborhoods. “Is token integration the solution to our problem?” SNCC leaders asked the city’s Black residents. “Would you move your family into Gage Park? Who is kidding who?”38
At the same time, the idea of curing poverty and hopelessness from within afflicted communities presented another alternative to the goal of open housing. The grassroots community organizing projects of Saul Alinsky’s Industrial Areas Foundation in such cities as Chicago and Rochester, New York, and the programs of Black Panther Party chapters in Oakland and San Francisco, California, and other cities popularized the empowering of inner-city residents where they lived. Influenced by the push for community organization and Black empowerment, federal government programs began to reflect the goal of strengthening rather than abandoning troubled neighborhoods. The Community Action Program, a part of Johnson’s War on Poverty legislation, called for the “maximum feasible participation” of the residents of areas receiving federal funds to shape federal programs to remedy their social problems. The Model Cities program, another Johnson initiative passed in 1966, aimed at producing a coordinated attack by government and nonprofit agencies at the local level on housing, employment, and other social problems within the slums and blighted areas of particular communities.39
In 1966, Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward, activists and scholars of these community action programs, articulated their own case against integrationist urban policies. In a direct slap at the open housing movement, they pointed out that the multitude of legal reforms and education campaigns had failed to alter patterns of residential segregation. Citing the historical precedents for ethnic self-help efforts, Piven and Cloward embraced the concept of racial separatism and urged reformers to abandon the goal of desegregation because it was delaying urgently needed improvements in the inner city.40
The challenges posed by rival policies, however, only stiffened the resolve of the integrationist leaders of the open housing movement. Horne, the chair of the NCDH executive committee, blasted critics of open housing for wishing to “polish up” the ghetto, which he had learned long ago that “traditional racist-oriented forces” had created. The ghetto must be destroyed, Horne declared, because it “is the bar sinister; it is the Pandora’s box out of which fly segregated schools, segregated lives and violence in the streets.” Federal slum rehabilitation and Model Cities programs, he charged, compromised with an evil akin to “Attila or Hitler or Beelzebub.”41
In 1967, the NCDH took aim at the community-based Model Cities program in a widely publicized broadside titled How the Federal Government Builds Ghettos. The NCDH manifesto recited the history of discriminatory policies of the FHA and the federal public housing administration and the current government practices that upheld segregated living patterns. Although the authors called for withholding all federal funding that benefited all-white communities, their chief goal was to persuade the federal government to force the FHA to implement aggressive anti-discriminatory measures and compel local governments to adopt affirmative open housing policies in Model Cities, urban renewal, public housing, and federal programs.42
Ironically, Weaver, now secretary of HUD, was forced to respond to charges similar to those he himself had made. In response to the NCDH manifesto, he issued a memo that ordered HUD undersecretaries to meet nondiscrimination requirements or answer to him. Then, in an effort to satisfy both sides in the ghetto debate, Weaver announced that HUD was pursuing policies to break down segregation and to build up the inner city, foreshadowing the “balanced approach” that the fair housing rule would take four decades later.43
A First Try for a National Fair Housing Law
In the midst of the debates about Black Power and the explosions of violence that marked the urban crisis era, advocates for fair housing pressed the federal government to expand Kennedy’s limited executive order against housing discrimination. They sought an executive order, rather than a new law, for the practical reason that issuing an executive order would avoid a risky battle over what the liberal lobbying organization Americans for Democratic Action termed “a sensitive political issue.” The Johnson administration rejected that approach because of concerns about its constitutionality and instead in April 1966 included the fair housing measure as part of its proposed civil rights legislation. Title IV of the proposed Civil Rights Act of 1966 contained much of the language, some of it verbatim, that would be enacted two years later as the Fair Housing Act. The bill banned any refusal to sell or rent a home, offer real estate services, make a housing loan, or show a dwelling available for sale or rent because of race, color, religion, and national origin.44
Unlike the later Fair Housing Act, the 1966 Civil Rights Act gave HUD a subsidiary role: it placed primary responsibility for enforcement of its fair housing provisions with the attorney general and relegated the secretary of HUD to investigating and referring complaints of housing discrimination. Under a section titled “Assistance by the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development,” the act also ordered HUD to study and issue reports on housing discrimination. The last provision of this section reiterated and strengthened the gist of Kennedy’s 1962 executive order by instructing HUD to administer its programs “in a manner affirmatively to further the policies of this title.” The language of the provision, including the word “affirmatively,” echoes a bill of particulars that the NCDH submitted to the White House in April 1966 while the legislation was being drafted. Castigating HUD officials at all levels who refused to follow nondiscriminatory practices, the NCDH cataloged numerous HUD subagencies and programs that tolerated or actively discriminated against African Americans.45
The long history of efforts by the NCDH and civil rights groups to reform government practices, internal HUD documents, and the language of the provision itself indicate that the authors of the legislation inserted the “affirmatively further” phrase to galvanize department officials to implement federal programs—especially the FHA, public housing, and Model Cities—in ways that neither discriminated against Blacks nor encouraged racial segregation.46
But the time was not yet ripe for a federal open housing law. In Chicago, working-class whites revolted against the Democrats for allowing the fair housing marches and voted to defeat the liberal Illinois senator, Paul Douglas. In California, a two-year battle over fair housing legislation resulted in voters passing a constitutional amendment that protected property owners’ rights and throwing out the liberal governor Pat Brown in favor of Ronald Reagan. In Washington, the Civil Rights Act of 1966 passed in the House but failed in the Senate. The Senate minority leader, Illinois Republican Everett Dirksen, blamed the bill’s open housing provisions, which he had adamantly opposed.47
President Johnson and the liberals in Congress nonetheless continued to press for legislation that would ban discrimination in housing. In August 1967, Walter Mondale, the Democratic senator from Minnesota, introduced a fair housing bill that would empower HUD to prevent anyone from engaging in racial discrimination with regard to housing transactions. Under this bill, HUD could investigate incidents of discrimination, initiate complaints, and, if negotiation failed, issue cease-and-desist orders. Nonetheless, the Fair Housing Act of 1967 seemed unlikely to pass. The House of Representatives Subcommittee on Housing and Urban Affairs held hearings, but, believing that the time was not right, the members chose not to submit the bill to the House.
The Legislative Arguments for Fair Housing
Debates over the nature of the ghetto permeated the hearings on fair housing legislation, which took place in 1966 and 1967. Congressional representatives and committee hearing witnesses alike portrayed African Americans as helpless victims who were imprisoned in ghettos, exaggerating the plight of Black city dwellers for dramatic effect. Supporting the 1966 bill, for example, Republican representative Charles Mathias of Maryland asserted that fair housing would free African Americans from the “physical shackles of the ghetto.” HUD secretary Weaver declared that discrimination in housing “chain[ed] almost all nonwhites” to ghettos and a life of deprivation.48
The ghettos, the fair housing proponents explained, took a heavy toll on their inhabitants. In his testimony to the House Subcommittee on Housing and Urban Affairs, NCDH cofounder Algernon Black, speaking for the ACLU, echoed Clark’s Dark Ghetto when he explained that the cost of the forced existence in the racial ghetto could be measured “in the health, the life expectancy, juvenile delinquency, mental illness, family disorganization, a tremendous cost in suffering, in waste of talent, in destruction of motivation to learn and work, in the victims who live in the ghetto.” Making a legal argument to the subcommittee, Attorney General Ramsey Clark argued that discrimination in housing deprived Blacks of the “equal protection” guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment by forcing them to live in underserved and inadequate ghetto living environments.49
The fair housing law, Senator Mondale repeatedly argued, was necessary to eliminate America’s racial ghettos. Without it, he asserted, “black racists” who advocated for separatism could demonstrate that white Americans were forcing African Americans to live in rotting ghettos. The matter was urgent, Mondale and several witnesses argued, because the ghetto was a primary cause of the violence rocking American cities. Putting an exclamation point on this argument, the authors of the highly influential Kerner Commission report, which was published in March while the bill was under consideration, presented the ghettos as a prima facie example of an unequal racially divided society and pinned much of the blame for urban riots on them.50
Mondale, however, often explained that the fair housing law would not by itself eliminate the ghettos. He and other witnesses, including administration officials, insisted that fair housing was essential but acknowledged that other efforts—new housing outside the ghettos as well as education, jobs, health care, recreation, and social services—would also be necessary to help the low-income residents of America’s inner-city neighborhoods.
In fact, Mondale and some witnesses argued that under the act’s prohibition of housing discrimination, only middle-class Blacks would escape impoverished central-city neighborhoods. The law would put the American Dream within reach of respectable hard-working citizens, such as Navy officer Carlos Campbell and college professor Gerard Ferere, who both testified at the hearings that their attempts to find homes had been repeatedly rejected because of their race.
Some of the law’s supporters even reassured fearful whites that low-income African Americans could not afford to buy houses in the suburbs. Fair housing, Senator Edward Brooke of Massachusetts explained, “will scarcely lead to a mass dispersal of the ghetto population to the suburbs; but it will make it possible for those who have the resources to escape.” Ironically, some fair housing supporters seemed willing to consign the poor to the dreadful ghettos they described to allay the fears of white suburbanites and their representatives of an invasion by low-income city dwellers.51
Other supporters of the Fair Housing Act agreed that eliminating discrimination in housing transactions would not be sufficient and pushed for a broader attack on the problem of the ghetto. Senator William Proxmire, a Democrat from Wisconsin, accused suburban governments of excluding members of racial minorities and poor people through zoning ordinances, building codes, and other forms of seemingly neutral land-use restrictions. Real estate professionals in favor of fair housing heartily agreed, testifying that large-lot zoning, community facility requirements, and local opposition to density of land use made it next to impossible to develop row houses or garden apartments, let alone multifamily buildings. NCDH executive director Edward Rutledge concurred, noting that suburban officials concerned about the cost of providing public services used a range of such legal and administrative devices to keep out low- and moderate-income families with children.52
To broaden the scope of the fair housing legislation, Proxmire suggested adopting what he called carrot and stick provisions. He proposed withholding HUD funding from places that used regulatory devices that inhibited the development of housing for people of low and moderate incomes and rewarding those jurisdictions that had made a clear effort to provide such housing. Several witnesses agreed with Proxmire, but Congress had little appetite for a sweeping approach that imposed penalties on communities.53
In January 1968, Johnson called on Congress to pass the Civil Rights Act, including the open housing provision. Soon thereafter, Mondale, working with liberal allies in the Senate, managed to attach his bill to legislation for protecting civil rights workers. Having held hearings and debated the bill extensively in previous sessions, Congress now chiefly struggled over procedural issues. In February and March, the Democratic leadership maneuvered to obtain additional votes to cut off a filibuster by Southern conservatives. The cloture effort gained almost enough votes when Senate minority leader Dirksen threw his support in return for weakening the bill’s enforcement provision and reducing its coverage. In March, the release of the dramatic Kerner Commission report shook loose the remaining needed votes.54
After passing the Senate, the bill went to the House, where it appeared it might expire in the Rules Committee. But the assassination of King on April 4, and the ensuing violence in the streets of Washington, galvanized the House, which passed the Senate’s version of the bill by a wide margin. On April 11, Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1968 into law, including Title VIII.
The Provision That Inspired the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing Rule
Consistent with its history, the Fair Housing Act aimed to stop discrimination, first in the selling and renting of residences and second in the corollary activities of real estate brokering and lending. It covered anyone involved in private housing transactions, with the exceptions of owner-occupants who owned buildings with four or fewer dwellings or who sold their single-family houses without professional help. As in earlier proposed legislation, the Fair Housing Act prohibited discrimination in any form of real estate financing. Beside prohibiting real estate steering and redlining by lenders, the law included a new provision to ban the practice of blockbusting. The 1968 law placed HUD in charge of enforcement, but the agency could only act in response to individuals’ complaints and use persuasion to change discriminatory behaviors or, as a last resort, refer the cases to the Justice Department.
Section 808 of the Fair Housing Act, which detailed its administration, twice replicated this phrase from the proposed 1966 legislation: “in a manner affirmatively to further the policies of this title.” The first use of the phrase broadened the scope of responsibility to require all federal agencies to take action to prevent discrimination in any housing and urban development programs they carried out and cooperate with HUD in their efforts. The law’s second invocation of the phrase, somewhat redundantly, ordered HUD also to administer its programs in accord with the Fair Housing Act. In both cases, as in the 1966 legislation, this language, as Mara Sidney points out, aimed at ensuring that federal officials incorporated fair housing principles into the FHA, public housing, urban renewal, and Model Cities.55
The directive to HUD, however, did not indicate what manner the agency should employ to affirmatively further the principles of fair housing. Perhaps the authors used vague language because they wished to avoid political controversy or to accommodate future circumstances. In any case, it was not until twenty years after the passage of the law that the federal government first began to codify methods for implementing fair housing policies.56
Another part of the same section set a precedent for the data sharing of the 2015 AFFH Rule. The Kennedy executive order created the President’s Committee on Equal Opportunity in Housing to confer with and encourage government agencies and fair housing citizen groups to eliminate discrimination in government-assisted housing and facilities. The fair housing bills of the late 1960s shifted the authority for similar activities to the newly created HUD. The provision that became Section 808 of the Fair Housing Act specified ways that HUD, through its secretary, must assist the anti-discrimination cause: through studying and reporting housing discrimination practices and giving technical assistance to public or private agencies and institutions “which are formulating or carrying on programs to prevent or eliminate discriminatory housing practices.” Then, as now, it made sense for HUD to coordinate with and support the fair housing efforts of state and municipal governments and local citizen organizations.57
The Conundrum of Housing Discrimination and Racial Segregation
In the first part of the twentieth century, pervasive racist attitudes among white Americans underpinned a wide range of individual and institutional conduct, laws, and policies intended to oppress African Americans. To begin to overthrow this system of racial bias, civil rights activists and reformers in the housing field chose to challenge the government’s role in upholding racial inequity. The initial approach of the fair housing movement, thus, was to fight to end discriminatory policies, such as racial zoning, enforcement of racial covenants, and government-supported discrimination in real estate lending, brokering, and urban redevelopment projects, such as Stuyvesant Town. Ultimately, civil rights advocates strove to achieve fair housing legislation that would outlaw private acts of discrimination in housing transactions.
In their battles for equity in housing, fair housing advocates deployed the idea of the racial ghetto to symbolize the unjust consequences of racial prejudice in the housing sector. In the 1940s, advocates insisted that racial covenants and clauses in the FHA’s underwriting manual helped segregate Blacks into compulsory ghettos, emphasizing the injustice of confining African Americans to certain places. Twenty years after the covenants had been banned and the FHA’s manual had been revised, the supporters of a fair housing law governing private transactions asserted the evils of these racial ghettos, depicting them as miserable places of entrenched poverty that caused a wide range of social ills. Fair housing advocates accordingly stressed not only the need for anti-discrimination provisions but also the importance of breaking up the ghettos and integrating neighborhoods throughout metropolitan areas.
The authors of the Fair Housing Act, however, wrote a law aimed at preventing acts of discrimination by those involved in real estate transactions and the government agencies that supported them. Amendments passed in 1988 strengthened the law significantly, giving HUD the power to initiate complaints, issue subpoenas, and, if needed, order the Justice Department to commence litigation. In the following years, enforcement of the Fair Housing Act has waxed and waned from one presidential administration to another, but through complaints, field tests, and lawsuits, the law has helped curtail many instances of discrimination. In the 1990s, HUD attempted to encourage local officials to identify and counteract the practices that prevented members of racial minority groups and other protected classes from residing in their own jurisdictions. Applying the fair housing review criteria to all its programs in 1995, HUD required recipients of community planning and development funds to provide fair housing plans, called Analyses of Impediments (AIs), but problems with HUD’s implementation led the agency in 2015 to propose the AFFH Rule.58
Meanwhile, advocates have supplemented the Fair Housing Act by filing lawsuits, many of them successful, against public housing authorities, suburban towns, developers, and landlords for racially discriminatory practices. They have also implemented programs to give low-income and minority families the option to move out of inner-city neighborhoods into affluent suburban communities. Like the programs initiated by fair housing advocates in the 1960s, these mobility programs have been painfully slow and moved relatively small numbers of people, but in many instances, they have benefited their participants.59
Although levels of Black-white segregation have declined somewhat nationally since the passage of the Fair Housing Act, they remain high. One important reason, as several scholars have pointed out, is the discrepancy between the goals of eliminating discrimination in housing and fostering integrated neighborhoods. “Housing discrimination and racial segregation,” historian Wendell Pritchett writes, “are intimately related . . . [but] not the result of the same set of factors.” Vigorous enforcement of anti-discrimination measures, then, will reduce injustice but not necessarily integrate neighborhoods.60
Residential patterns of population groups at any given time are the product of numerous factors. Racial discrimination in all its ugly forms continues to be an important factor. Racial disparities in wealth combined with the availability and cost of homes are also factors. As such, the web of land-use regulations—zoning, environmental protection of land, and restrictions on multifamily and other relatively dense residential structures—continues to inhibit the construction of multifamily and low-cost dwellings in high-income communities, limiting the availability of housing in those locations largely to the affluent.
Racial attitudes also influence the characteristics of neighborhoods, in particular the different perceptions of many whites and Blacks as to what proportion of the other’s race constitutes a comfortably integrated neighborhood.61 In addition, household incomes, the price of housing, and the personal priorities of individuals and households shape myriad decisions of where to live.
Indeed, fifty years after the passage of the Fair Housing Act, researchers seeking to explain the persistence of residential racial segregation have come to similar conclusions as those of researchers in the 1960s: when choosing a home, people rely on personal relationships for information, desire proximity to family members and friends, and look for familiar types of neighborhoods. Ironically, perhaps, increasing numbers of communities have become integrated in just this way, as racial tolerance has spread and the number of places with amenities attractive to members of multiple races and ethnicities has grown.62
Although designed primarily to root out acts of explicit housing discrimination in the sale or rental of properties, the Fair Housing Act included a provision to ensure that the federal government would affirmatively further fair housing in its own programs. The AFFH Rule of 2015 clarified that this provision also required the active cooperation of local officials in removing discriminatory obstacles and encouraging racial minorities and other protected groups to live in their towns.
As such, the rule echoes the ideas expressed in the midst of the debate about the original fair housing legislation by anti-discrimination activists and Senator Proxmire, who called in vain for a broad effort that included local governments receiving federal housing and community development funding. Proxmire and others realized that many factors influence the racial composition of communities. The complexity of causation in the past limited the effectiveness of anti-discrimination programs in reducing residential segregation. The question remains, then, whether the AFFH Rule, if properly implemented, could alter enough of the factors that shape America’s racial settlement patterns to bring about a thorough integration of America’s metropolitan areas.
ENDNOTES
1. During the 1940s and 1950s, whites attacked African Americans as they attempted to move to previously white or contested neighborhoods. Douglas S. Massey and Nancy A. Denton, American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 26–35; Charles Abrams, Forbidden Neighbors: A Study of Prejudice in Housing (New York: Harper, 1955); Robert Weaver, The Negro Ghetto (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1948), 90–96; Dominic Capeci Jr., Race Relations in Wartime Detroit: The Sojourner Truth Housing Controversy of 1942 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1984); Arnold R. Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago 1940–1960 (Cambridge; Cambridge University Press, 1983).
2. Wendy Plotkin, “‘Hemmed In’: The Struggle against Racial Restrictive Covenants and Deed Restrictions in Post-WWII Chicago,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society 94, no. 1 (April 1, 2001): 39–69; Michael Jones‐Correa, “The Origins and Diffusion of Racial Restrictive Covenants,” Political Science Quarterly 115, no. 4 (2000): 541–568.
3. Clement E. Vose, Caucasians Only: The Supreme Court, the NAACP, and the Restrictive Covenant Cases (Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1967), 57–64; Mark V. Tushnet, Making Civil Rights Law: Thurgood Marshall and the Supreme Court, 1936–1961 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 87–91. For a recent account of the legal campaign against restrictive covenants, see Jeffrey D. Gonda, Unjust Deeds: The Restrictive Covenant Cases and the Making of the Civil Rights Movement (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015).
4. The anti-covenant writers, many encouraged by Marshall, included public housing expert Charles Abrams, editor Charles S. Johnson, and lawyer Loren Miller. Vose, Caucasians Only, 22–23, 57, 64–65, 160–161, 275n45; Stephen L. Wabsy, Anthony A. D’Amato, and Rosemary Metrailer, Desegregation from Brown to Alexander: An Exploration of Supreme Court Strategies (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1977), 39; Mitchell Duneier, Ghetto: The Invention of a Place, the History of an Idea (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017), 24–32.
5. Shelley v. Kraemer, 334 U.S. 1 (U.S. 1948).
6. Weaver worked in the service as well. Philip G. Sadler, “The Dream and the Substance,” manuscript, 1954, Records of the Intergroup Relations Branch, Records of the Public Housing Administration, RG 196, National Archives (hereafter NA), College Park, Maryland. For the history of the federal government’s role in segregation, see Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America (New York: Liveright, 2017).
7. Weaver, The Negro Ghetto, 165.
8. D. Bradford Hunt, Blueprint for Disaster: The Unraveling of Chicago Public Housing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 79–98; Martin Meyerson, Politics, Planning, and the Public Interest: The Case of Public Housing in Chicago (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1955); Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto, 218–232.
9. Wendell E. Pritchett, Robert Clifton Weaver and the American City: The Life and Times of an Urban Reformer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008); A. Scott Henderson, Housing and the Democratic Ideal (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000).
10. Abrams, Forbidden Neighbors, 153–154; Arnold R. Hirsch, “Containment on the Home Front: Race and Federal Housing Policy from the New Deal to the Cold War,” Journal of Urban History 26, no. 2 (January 2000): 171, 179. For examples of public housing advocates’ censure of the FHA, see Eugenie Ladner Birch, “Edith Elmer Wood and the Genesis of Liberal Housing Thought, 1910–1942,” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1976), 186; Catherine Bauer, “National Labor Organizations Want Public Housing; Attack F.H.A.,” press release, American Federation of Labor Housing Committee, Building Trades Committee and Labor Housing Conference, February 18, 1936, cited in Mary Susan Cole, “Catherine Bauer and the Public Housing Movement, 1926–1937” (Ph.D. diss., George Washington University, 1975), 498; Charles Abrams, The Future of Housing (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1946), passim; Nathan Straus, The Seven Myths of Housing (New York: Knopf, 1944), 176.
11. David Freund, Colored Property: State Policy and White Racial Politics in Suburban American. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 155–162, 206–210; Rothstein, The Color of Law, 83–88; Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 207–210; Weaver, The Negro Ghetto, 71–73, 143–148, 217–222; Charles Abrams, “The Segregation Threat in Housing,” Commentary 7, no. 2 (February 1949): 123–131; Abrams, Forbidden Neighbors, 233–234.
12. Tushnet, Making Civil Rights Law, 97; Abrams, Forbidden Neighbors, 101–102, 233–234; Weaver, The Negro Ghetto, 149–154; National Committee Against Discrimination in Housing (NCDH), How the Federal Government Builds Ghettos (New York, 1967), available at https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/007131276; Wendell Pritchett, “Where Shall We Live? Class and the Limitations of Fair Housing Law,” Urban Lawyer 35, no. 3 (Summer 2003): 426–427; Rothstein, The Color of Law, 76–79, 88–90.
13. Abrams, “The Segregation Threat in Housing,” 125; Abrams, Forbidden Neighbors, 251–259.
14. Arthur R. Simon, Stuyvesant Town, U.S.A.: Pattern for Two Americas (New York: New York University Press, 1970); Pritchett, “Where Shall We Live?” 408–413.
15. The NCDH promoted a series of laws by New York City and New York State, starting with New York City’s Brown-Isaacs Law of 1951 through the Sharkey-Brown-Isaacs Bill of 1957 and New York State Wicks-Austin Law of 1950 through the Metcalf-Baker Act of 1969. “Toward Democracy in Housing: The NCDH Story,” Trends in Housing 4, no. 4 (August 1960): 4; Pritchett, “Where Shall We Live?” 431–439.
16. “Toward Democracy in Housing,” 4–5.
17. Interestingly, the report urged that proponents of racially integrated housing not attempt to integrate socioeconomic groups, which would encounter much more resistance. Davis McEntire, Residence and Race (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960), 352–355; Juliet Saltman, Open Housing: Dynamics of a Social Movement (New York: Praeger, 1978), 45–47; McEntire, Residence and Race, 5; “Toward Democracy in Housing,” 4–5.
18. In 1965, NCDH reported twenty-seven active fair housing committees in the five boroughs of New York City alone. “Toward Democracy in Housing,” 5; “Our Correspondents Report: Boston Suburbia,” Trends in Housing 2, no. 6 (November 1958): 5; “US Supreme Court Lets NJ Law Stand,” Trends in Housing 9, no. 3 (June 1965): 1, 6; “Capahosic Housing Conference,” Trends in Housing 9, no. 3 (June 1965): 3; “Local FH Law Surge,” Trends in Housing 12, no. 1 (January 1968): 1, 7. In his tabulation, Collins counted twenty-two states, one more than the NCDH, with open housing legislation. William J. Collins, “The Political Economy of State Fair Housing Laws before 1968,” Social Science History 30, no. 1 (2006): 15–49. For the growth of local open housing activity, see Saltman, Open Housing.
19. “NCDH to Propose Executive Order—Kennedy Committed,” Trends in Housing 4, no. 5 (September/October 1960): 1; “Weaver Confirmed as Housing Chief,” Trends in Housing 5, no. 1 (January/February 1961): 1, 8; “Nationwide Drive on for Executive Order,” Trends in Housing 5, no. 5 (September/October 1961): 1, 6; Henderson, Housing and the Democratic Ideal, 167–171; Carl M. Brauer, John F. Kennedy and the Second Reconstruction, Contemporary American History Series (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977), 210–211; John F. Kennedy, Executive Order 11063—Equal Opportunity in Housing, November 20, 1962.
20. Jack Rothman, “The Ghetto Makers,” The Nation, October 7, 1961, 222–225; W. E. Orser, Blockbusting in Baltimore: The Edmondson Village Story (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2003); Beryl Satter, Family Properties: Race, Real Estate, and the Exploitation of Black Urban America (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2009), 277; Rose Helper, Racial Policies and Practices of Real Estate Brokers (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1969); “US Focus: Blockbusting,” Trends in Housing 13, no. 4 (May 1969): 2.
21. Richard F. Muth, Cities and Housing: The Spatial Pattern of Urban Residential Land Use (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969); Historic Census of Housing Tables—Crowding, available at https://www.census.gov/hhes/www/housing/census/historic/crowding.html; Historic Census of Housing Tables—Plumbing https://www.census.gov/hhes/www/housing/census/historic/plumbing.html; Peter G. Rowe, Modernity and Housing (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1993), 184; Massey and Denton, American Apartheid, 47.
22. St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton, Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 174–213, 383; Loren Miller, “Covenants for Exclusion,” Survey Graphic 36, no. 10 (n.d.): 543, 558; Weaver, The Negro Ghetto, 7, 257–259, 269–271; Abrams, Forbidden Neighbors, 73–78.
23. The anthropologist Oscar Lewis introduced the phrase “culture of poverty” in Oscar Lewis, Margaret Mead, and O. LaFarge, Five Families: Mexican Case Studies in the Culture of Poverty (New York: Basic Books, 1975). For the influence of Lewis’s ideas and the concept of pathological ghetto culture, see Alice O’Connor, Poverty Knowledge: Social Science, Social Policy, and the Poor in Twentieth-Century U.S. History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 113–123, 197–210; Duneier, Ghetto, 107–111; Joe T. Darden, “The Ghetto: A Bibliography,” Exchange Bibliography (Council of Planning Librarians, July 1977), 4–5; Harlem Youth Opportunities Unlimited, Youth in the Ghetto—A Study of the Consequences of Powerlessness and a Blueprint for Change (New York: HARYOU, 1964); Michael Harrington, The Other America: Poverty in the United States (New York: Scribner, 1997); U.S. Department of Labor, Office of Policy Planning and Research, and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action (Washington, DC: U.S. GPO, 1965); Pierre DeVise, “Chicago’s Widening Color Gap” (Chicago: Community and Family Study Center, University of Chicago, 1967); Elliot Liebow, Tally’s Corner: A Study of Negro Streetcorner Men (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003); Lee Rainwater, Behind Ghetto Walls: Black Families in a Federal Slum (New Brunswick, NJ: Aldine Transaction, 2006).
24. Kenneth B. Clark, Dark Ghetto: Dilemmas of Social Power (New York: Harper and Row, 1965); Duneier, Ghetto, 85–138.
25. Clark and Myrdal, Dark Ghetto, 27; For an extensive assessment of Clark’s views on Black poverty and the ghetto, see Duneier, Ghetto, 85–138.
26. Clark and Myrdal, Dark Ghetto, 12, 30–31, 106.
27. Lyndon B. Johnson, “To Fulfill These Rights” (June 4, 1965).
28. Saltman, Open Housing, 52–59; “Broad Course Charted to Break Up Ghettos,” Trends in Housing 9, no. 5 (September/October 1965): 1 (quotation), 2, 4, 8–10.
29. “News Briefs,” Trends in Housing 10, no. 2 (April 1966): 8; The Report of the White House Conference to Fulfill These Rights, June 1–2, 1966, Washington, D.C. (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1966), 103–113; “Total Effort Urged to End Ghetto System,” Trends in Housing 10, no. 9 (December 1966): 1–4.
30. “Study Cities Influences Which Deter Integration,” Trends in Housing 7, no. 3 (June 1963): 2; Edward C. Banfield, The Unheavenly City: The Nature and the Future of Our Urban Crisis (Boston: Little, Brown, 1970), 92–95; Oscar Handlin, The Newcomers: Negroes and Puerto Ricans in a Changing Metropolis (New York: Doubleday, 1962), 93.
31. Lewis Watts, Howard E. Freeman, Helen M. Hughes, Robert Morris, and Thomas F. Pettigrew. The Middle-Income Negro Family Faces Urban Renewal (Boston: Department of Commerce and Development, Commonwealth of Massachusetts, 1964).
32. “Capahosic Housing Conference.”
33. Alan B. Anderson and George W. Pikering, Confronting the Color Line: The Broken Promise of the Civil Rights Movement in Chicago (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1986), 188–192; James R. Ralph Jr., Northern Protest: Martin Luther King, Jr., Chicago, and the Civil Rights Movement (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 88–90; Mary Lou Finley, “The Open Housing Marches: Chicago, Summer ’66,” in Chicago 1966: Open Housing Marches, Summit Negotiations, and Operation Breadbasket, ed. David J. Garrow (Brooklyn: Carlson Publishing, 1989), 7, 102.
34. Finley, “The Open Housing Marches,” 8–9; Ralph, Northern Protest, 99–104; Anderson and Pikering, Confronting the Color Line, 197–199.
35. After his experience in Chicago, King downplayed housing issues and instead concentrated his efforts on helping low-income Americans obtain jobs and higher incomes. Ralph, Northern Protest, 56–57, 149–219; Anderson and Pikering, Confronting the Color Line, 191, 216–228, 237–271.
36. The figure for those who moved to white neighborhoods is extrapolated from Berry’s calculation of the percentage of those applicants with neighborhood data regarding the number of people moving to different neighborhoods. Almost two-thirds of the placements moved to “transitional” neighborhoods, and more than half were placed in the polyglot Uptown neighborhood, home to white Appalachian migrants, Native Americans, and immigrants. Berry concluded that the housing service program was “a dismal failure.” Anderson and Pikering, Confronting the Color Line, 260–261, 281; Brian J. L. Berry, The Open Housing Question: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1966–1976 (Cambridge, MA: Ballinger Publishing, 1979), 27, 29, 46–62 (“dismal failure”).
37. Flynn McRoberts, “Gautreaux Housing Program Nears End,” Chicago Tribune, January 12, 1996; Fran Spielman, “Scattered-Site Could Spark Flight from City, Daley Says,” Chicago Sun-Times, April 27, 1996; Fran Spielman and Art Golab, “Scattered-Site Housing Foes Fume,” Chicago Sun-Times, May 2, 1996. For a review of the limitations and difficulties of relocation efforts, including Gautreaux, see Edward G. Goetz, “Housing Dispersal Programs,” Journal of Planning Literature 18, no. 1 (August 2003): 3–16. For the legal saga, see Alexander Polikoff, Waiting for Gautreaux: A Story of Segregation, Housing, and the Black Ghetto (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2005).
38. Catherine Ellis and Stephen Drury Smith, eds., Say It Plain: A Century of Great African-American Speeches (New York: New Press, 2005), 58; Anderson and Pikering, Confronting the Color Line, 275–276.
39. Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, P.L. 88–452, Title II, Section 202(a)(3); Demonstration Cities and Metropolitan Development Act of 1966 (Public Law 89–754).
40. “The Case against Urban Desegregation,” Social Work, January 1967, 12–21; Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward, “Desegregated Housing—Who Pays for the Reformers’ Ideal?” New Republic, December 17, 1966.
41. Frank Horne, “What Price, Rebuilding Ghettos as Ghettos?” Letter to the Editor in response to “Desegregated Housing,” Piven and Cloward, New Republic, December 17, 1966, reprinted in Trends in Housing 11, no. 1 (January 1967): 4.
42. NCDH, How the Federal Government Builds Ghettos.
43. Robert Weaver to President Lyndon Johnson, memorandum, February 9, 1967; Robert Weaver to Harry C. McPherson Jr., memorandum, March 22, 1967, NCDH file, Subject Correspondence Files of Secretary Robert C. Weaver, Box 305, RG 207, NA; “US Is Labeled Ghetto Builder,” Trends in Housing 11, no. 2 (February 1967): 1, 2-3.
44. Unlike its successor, however, the 1966 law applied only to real estate professionals and not to homeowners. “Executive Order on Housing,” Trends in Housing 9, no. 4 (August 1965): 4; “NAACP Adopts Broad Plan to Accelerate Open Occupancy,” ibid., 10; “1966 Civil Rights Act Dies in Senate,” in CQ Almanac 1966, 22nd ed. (Washington, DC: Congressional Quarterly, 1967), 5; Civil Rights Act of 1966, H.R. 14765.
45. NCDH, “Bill of Particulars Submitted to the White House,” April 22, 1966, reprinted in How the Federal Government Builds Ghettos, 5–13, uses “affirmatively,” “affirmative action,” and “affirmative programs” throughout the document.
46. An internal HUD committee chaired by Leonard Duhl argued that the phrase promoted a policy that was “both affirmative and aggressive” and recommended that Secretary Weaver write a memo to HUD program administrators that forcefully urged them to realize equal opportunity in housing, full participation by racial minorities in department affairs, and the “elimination of enforced ghettos and achievement of racially inclusive patterns and trends in housing.” Although vague about actual steps, this latter demand echoed the concerns of many activists. The proposed memo went far beyond the language of the bill, however, and the HUD secretary rejected the recommendation to issue it. Civil Rights Act of 1966, H.R. 14765, Section 407(d), Section 409—quotation in subsection (e); “Report of the Work Group on Social Concerns,” August 23, 1966; draft memorandum, disapproved by the secretary, August 24, 1966, Subject Correspondence Files of Secretary Robert C. Weaver, Box 305, RG 207, NA.
47. Darren Miles, “The Art of the Possible: Everett Dirksen’s Role in Civil Rights Legislation of the 1950s and 1960s,” Western Illinois Historical Review I (Spring 2009): 108–115; “1966 Civil Rights Act Dies in Senate.”
48. Opponents also acknowledged the evils of the ghetto but denied that fair housing would remedy them. Mara S. Sidney, “Images of Race, Class, and Markets: Rethinking the Origin of U.S. Fair Housing Policy,” Journal of Policy History 13, no. 2 (2001): 181–214; Fair Housing Act of 1967, Hearings, 9, 36; Minority views of Hon. Basil L. Whitener on HR 14765, Title IV, House Committee on the Judiciary, Civil Rights Act of 1966, a report to accompany H.R. 14765, 59.
49. Other witnesses, such as Roy Wilkins, the executive director of the NAACP, made the same point. Fair Housing Act of 1967, Hearings, 8–10, 105, 174.
50. At hearings on the 1967 bill held on August 21 that year, Mondale repeated the argument about “black racists” in his opening statement and twice more in colloquy with Attorney General Clark, at one point stating, “It seems to me that one of the biggest arguments that we give to the black racists is the existence of ghetto living.” The chairman of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders was Illinois governor Otto Kerner. Fair Housing Act of 1967, Hearings, 2, 22, 28 (above quote); for examples of Mondale and witnesses blaming the ghetto for recent violence, see testimony of Frankie M. Freeman, member of U.S. Civil Rights Commission, Fair Housing Act of 1967, Hearings, 76, 80, 83, 86; testimony of Roy Wilkins, 98; testimony of Rev. Robert F. Drinan, S.J., Dean, Boston College Law School, 127; testimony of Algernon Black, speaking for American Civil Liberties Union, 179; Sidney, “Images of Race, Class, and Markets,” 195–196; U.S. Kerner Commission, Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (New York: Bantam Books, 1968).
51. A few open housing advocates opposed this approach. As early as 1965, George B. Nesbitt, the director of the federal housing agency’s Low-Income Demonstration program, told an NCDH conference to abandon “upper-class-ism” that led to working only with middle-class people to integrate neighborhoods. Fair Housing Act of 1967, Hearings, 2, 27, 47–48; Sidney, “Images of Race, Class, and Markets,” 196–198; “Broad Course Charted to Break Up Ghettos,” 2–3.
52. Local fair housing organizations had long fought such restrictions. Fair Housing Act of 1967, Hearings, 73, 363–364, 217, 416–417; Sidney, “Images of Race, Class, and Markets”; “‘Feudal Caste System’ in Greenwich, Conn.,” Trends in Housing 10, no. 2 (April 1966): 8.
53. Fair Housing Act of 1967, Hearings, testimony of Proxmire, 73, 177–178, 417; Sidney, “Images of Race, Class, and Markets,” 208.
54. The revised bill reduced HUD’s ability to initiate actions against discriminating parties and exempted sales of single-family dwellings by owner-occupants who did not use real estate brokers. Jean E. Dubofsky, “Fair Housing: A Legislative History and a Perspective,” Washburn Law Journal 8 (1969): 149–158; Fair Housing Act of 1967, Hearings before the Subcommittee on Housing and Urban Affairs of the Committee on Banking and Currency of the United States, Ninetieth Congress, First Session on S.1358, S. 2114, and S.2280, August 22 and 23, 1967.
55. Other agencies included, for example, the Department of Defense, which, in response to criticism for tolerating racial segregation, was attempting to ensure that all service members had equal access to housing close to military installations. Civil Rights Act of 1966, Title IV, Section 409(e); Civil Rights Act of 1968 (P.L. 90–284), Title VIII, Section 808(d); Fair Housing Act of 1967, Hearings, 80, 89–96, 106–107; Sidney, “Images of Race, Class, and Markets,” 205.
56. In 1988, HUD, under pressure from the courts and at the request of the Department of Justice, introduced criteria for communities receiving Community Development Block Grant funds that required them to conduct AIs regarding fair housing choice and address any identified impediments. Sidney, “Images of Race, Class, and Markets,” 205; HUD, Office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity, Fair Housing Planning Guide 1, 2–3; Federal Register 53, no. 172 (Tuesday, September 6, 1988), Rules and Regulations, 34430, 34434–34435, 33450, 34457, 34468–34469 (§ 570.904 Equal Opportunity and Fair Housing Criteria).
57. Executive Order 11063, Parts II, IV, and V; Civil Rights Act of 1966, Title IV, Section 409(a–c).
58. HUD, Fair Housing Planning Guide, 3–5; Raphael Bostic and Arthur Acolin, “The Potential for HUD’s Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing Rule to Meaningfully Increase Inclusion,” 2018, 4–5, available at http://www.jchs.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/a_shared_future_potential_for_hud_affh_increase_inclusion.pdf; “Consolidated Submission for Community Planning and Development Programs,” Federal Register, January 5, 1995, available at https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/1995/01/05/94-32150/consolidated-submission-for-community-planning-and-development-programs.
59. Goetz, “Housing Dispersal Programs”; Charles M. Haar, Suburbs Under Siege (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996); David Kirp, Our Town: Race, Housing, and the Soul of Suburbia, 1st ed. (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996); John Goering and Judith D. Feins, Choosing a Better Life? Evaluating the Moving to Opportunity Social Experiment (Washington, DC: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003).
60. James A. Kushner, “Fair Housing Amendments Act of 1988: The Second Generation of Fair Housing,” Vanderbilt Law Review 42 (1989): 1049–1120; Richard Sander, “Individual Rights and Demographic Realities: The Problem of Fair Housing,” Northwestern University Law Review 82 (n.d.): 888–902; Sidney, “Images of Race, Class, and Markets,” 206–207; Brian Patrick Larkin, “The Forty-Year ‘First Step’: The Fair Housing Act as an Incomplete Tool for Suburban Integration,” Columbia Law Review 107, no. 7 (November 2007): 1617–1654; Pritchett, “Where Shall We Live?” 469–470.
61. Reynolds Farley, Elaine Fielding, and Maria Krysan, “The Residential Preferences of Blacks and Whites: A Four-Metropolis Analysis,” Housing Policy Debate 8 (January 1, 1997): 763–800; Reynolds Farley, Charlotte Steeh, Tara Jackson, Maria Krysan, Keith Reeves, “Continued Racial Residential Segregation in Detroit: ‘Chocolate City, Vanilla Suburbs’ Revisited,” Journal of Housing Research 4, no. 1 (1993): 1–38; William A. V. Clark, “Residential Segregation in American Cities,” in Issues in Housing Discrimination 1, A Consultation/Hearing of the United States Commission on Civil Rights, Washington, D.C. (November 12, 1985), 39.
62. Maria Krysan and Kyle Crowder, Cycle of Segregation: Social Processes and Residential Stratification (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2017); Laura Carrillo, Mary Pattillo, Erin Hardy, and Dolores Acevedo-Garcia, “Housing Decisions among Low-Income Hispanic Households in Chicago,” Cityscape 18, no. 2 (May 1, 2016): 109–149; Kimberly Kobba and Edward G. Goetz, “Mobility Decisions of Very Low-Income Households,” Cityscape 15, no. 2 (2013): 155–172; Ingrid Gould Ellen, Sharing America’s Neighborhoods: The Prospects for Stable Racial Integration (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001); Michael Maly, Beyond Segregation: Multiracial and Multiethnic Neighborhoods (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2005). William Frey has found—despite the persistence of relatively high levels of Black segregation, especially in the old industrial North—an overall decline in segregation. William H. Frey, “Census Shows Modest Declines in Black-White Segregation,” Brookings, December 8, 2015, available at https://www.brookings.edu/blog/the-avenue/2015/12/08/census-shows-modest-declines-in-black-white-segregation/.