No fair housing law in 1967
Congress did not pass a Civil Rights Act in 1967, and it did not pass a fair housing law that year. The Fair Housing Act, which is Title VIII of the Civil Rights Act of 1968, was signed by President Johnson on 11 April 1968, a week after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis on 4 April. The attempts to pass such a law in 1966 and 1967 both failed, and that failure explains why housing was the last of the great civil rights bills of the decade.
Why housing was left out
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 dealt with public accommodations, employment and federally funded programmes, but not with the sale or rental of homes. Housing was politically harder. It involved private property, local control and, in the North, the interests of white homeowners who might have supported earlier laws aimed at the South. Segregated neighbourhoods had been built up by many forces: real estate practices, restrictive covenants (which the Supreme Court had refused to enforce in 1948), lending policies and, in some cases, federal mortgage programmes that favoured white suburbs.
Detroit housing discrimination, for example, shaped the pattern of the city well before 1967. Similar patterns existed in Chicago, Newark and many other places. The Supreme Court’s ruling on private discrimination was limited, and the Kennedy administration’s 1962 executive order covered only federally assisted housing, so most of the market remained open to discrimination.
The 1966 attempt
In 1966 the Johnson administration proposed a civil rights bill that included a ban on housing discrimination, along with provisions on federal jury selection and protection for people exercising civil rights. The House passed a version of the bill in August 1966, with the housing section weakened by amendments. In the Senate it ran into a filibuster in September. Two attempts to end debate in that month fell short of the two-thirds then required, and the bill died. Senator Everett Dirksen, who had been decisive in 1964, opposed the housing section at that time.
The political setting hurt the bill. During the summer of 1966, King and the Chicago Freedom Movement held marches through white neighbourhoods in Chicago to protest housing discrimination, and they met angry crowds. A rock thrown at King in August was one of the most widely reported incidents. An agreement with Chicago’s leaders later that month was widely seen as weak. The white backlash visible in those scenes carried into the November 1966 elections, in which Republicans made large gains.
The 1967 attempt
Johnson asked for fair housing legislation again in 1967. This time the proposals did not clear Congress. The new Congress had fewer Democratic allies, the attention of lawmakers was on the war and the budget, and the 1967 summer riots pushed the mood toward law and order rather than new rights. The Powell exclusion in March had already shown that the House was in no mood for gestures on race. A housing measure did not come to a vote that could have enacted it.
One development that year did relate to the topic. In May 1967 the Supreme Court, in Reitman v. Mulkey, upheld a California ruling against a state constitutional amendment, passed by voters in 1964, that would have protected the right of property owners to refuse to sell or rent. This was a court decision about a state measure, not a federal housing law.
The 1968 breakthrough
In early 1968 Senators Walter Mondale and Edward Brooke pressed the housing provision, and Dirksen, after negotiating changes, backed a compromise version. The Senate ended a filibuster and passed the bill in March 1968. It then went to the House, where the Rules Committee had been a barrier, and the outlook was uncertain.
King’s killing on 4 April, followed by riots in many cities, changed the mood. The House passed the Senate version on 10 April, and Johnson signed it the next day. It prohibited discrimination in the sale, rental and financing of most housing on the basis of race, colour, religion or national origin. Sex was added later, in the 1970s, and disability and family status in 1988.
Limits of the act
The 1968 law was weaker in enforcement than many advocates wanted. At first it relied heavily on conciliation and private lawsuits, and the Department of Housing and Urban Development had limited power to compel compliance. Not until the 1988 amendments did the system gain stronger enforcement mechanisms. In the meantime segregated neighbourhoods persisted, and the Kerner Commission report released in early 1968 had already described how deeply segregation was tied to urban unrest.
The sequence is worth keeping straight: no housing law in 1967, a hard-won law in April 1968, and slow, imperfect progress afterwards.