ON A COOL SPRING DAY in April 1968, President Lyndon Johnson walked into the White House’s East Room, where he was greeted with what the Associated Press described as “loud, enthusiastic, and sustained” applause from civil rights leaders and politicos alike. It had been a week since James Earl Ray killed Martin Luther King Jr. with a single shot, triggering a wave of civil unrest some called the Holy Week Uprisings. A day after the murder, Johnson had sent a letter to Congress urging them to expedite a bill that would outlaw housing discrimination based on “the color of his [a man’s] skin.” Then, six days later, he was in the House Chamber to sign the Civil Rights Act of 1968, which included Title VIII, the Fair Housing Act. “Now the Negro families no longer suffer the humiliation of being turned away because of their race,” he said.
But saying so did not make it so. While blatant discrimination faded in some areas of Black American life, the real estate market was not transformed with the stroke of LBJ’s pen. Even now, after more than half a century has elapsed, statistics show persistent inequality in the housing sector. In 1960, eight years before passage of the Fair Housing Act, 65 percent of white Americans owned their homes, compared to 38 percent of Black Americans. Last year, 74.6 percent of whites owned their homes while only 45.3 percent of Blacks did. Over the last sixty-two years, not only has the racial gap remained, it has grown from a 27-point gap to a more than 29-point gap today.
Washington, D.C. itself is a case study in failed aspirations, and not just because of legislation that didn’t deliver on a promise. A city with a rich history of Black migration and a growing Black middle class has remained segregated, almost as if it were two: one city serving as a bastion of opportunity for the educated elite, the other as a once-imagined cultural utopia in decay. In the wider metropolitan area, the disparity is especially pronounced, as is the case with most urban-suburban comparisons. The Center for Economic Studies reported last year that, based on 2020 census data, the level of segregation in the greater Washington area (often called DMV, for District, Maryland, and Virginia) ranked as “very high.” On an index that measures Black-white segregation among fifty metro areas in the United States with the largest Black populations, D.C. was thirteenth highest. Census data also shows that white homeownership in the D.C. metro region is around 50 percent, while it’s just shy of 26 percent for Blacks.
“In terms of the laws on the books, we are measurably better now,” Mechele dikkerson, a public policy professor at the University of Texas at Austin, and author of Homeownership and America’s Financial Underclass, told me. But if the question is whether we’ve achieved housing equality, “we are no closer now than we were fifty years ago.”
Civil Disorders
The Fair Housing Act was a long time coming. Just a year before the Holy Week Uprisings, lingering resentment among Blacks boiled over. In the summer of 1967, more than 150 race riots broke out in major cities across the country, leading to dozens of deaths and thousands of arrests, particularly in Detroit and Newark. On July 27, 1967, only days after ordering federal troops to Detroit, President Johnson addressed the nation in a televised speech. “The only genuine, long-range solution for what has happened lies in an attack—mounted at every level—upon the conditions that breed despair and violence,” he said. “All of us know what those conditions are: ignorance, discrimination, slums, poverty, disease, not enough jobs.”He then announced the creation of a special Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, overseen by Governor Otto Kerner of Illinois. Seven months later, the Kerner Commission released a 431-page report that identified segregation and poverty as the main drivers of the collective Black rage. “Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal,” the report warned. “What white Americans have never fully understood—but what the Negro can never forget—is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it.”In one instance in 1944, a Black federal government employee bought a three-story Bloomingdale rowhouse, only to be forced to vacate after her white neighbors took her to court.
Then, as now, it was difficult for much of white America to accept such a statement, or even grasp what it meant. Many northern liberals may have assumed resistance to integration was primarily a relic of the old South. Yet, as Richard Rothstein, a research associate at the Economic Policy Institute, wrote in his 2017 book The Color of Law, racial segregation wasn’t just a southern preoccupation: “It was a nationwide project of the federal government in the twentieth century, designed and implemented by its most liberal leaders.” Rothstein traces the ways New Deal policies were designed to make home-buying easier, but also to consistently “enforce residential racial segregation.” Homeownership was a high-risk, high-cost venture before the Great Depression, so less than half of Americans owned their homes at the turn of the century. When the Depression hit, foreclosures drove hundreds of thousands out of their homes.