A 1968 housing law echoes today
The panel opened with a video of former U.S. president Lyndon B. Johnson speaking in his Texas drawl.
“I do not exaggerate when I say that the proudest moments of my presidency have been times such as this, when I have signed into law the promises of a century,” the former president said.
Just over 50 years ago, Johnson signed the Fair Housing Act. From that point on, people couldn’t legally refuse to rent or sell housing on the basis of race. The 1968 law also prohibited discrimination based on color, religion, sex or national origin.
Updates to the law later blocked discrimination based on disability or familial status, such as pregnancy or the presence of children. A federal judge ruled last year that the law also prevents discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity and a bill to formalize that ruling into law has been introduced in Congress.
On July 17, an expert panel at the National Civil Rights Museum debated what the Fair Housing Act means today.
The consensus: American society still struggles with many problems associated with racialized segregation and poverty.
“I think the Fair Housing Act is ambitious and inclusive in its mandate and it has never realized its potential,” said Kalima Rose, a vice president with PolicyLink, a research institute focused on social equality.
The moderator of the panel, Areva Martin, spoke about her own story and why housing matters.
She described growing up in a housing project in St. Louis, and how her severely disabled grandmother sent her and her brother out to stand in line to get yellow cheese and powdered milk.
Later on, Martin made it to the University of Chicago, fell in love with studying in the library, won admission to Harvard Law School, and eventually became a civil rights attorney and TV personality on networks such as CNN.
She addressed a key organizer of the panel, Habitat for Humanity of Greater Memphis, as well as the organization’s sponsors, which include IBERIABANK.
“I just want to say to the sponsors here, when you give money to organizations like Habitat and when you invest in neighborhoods like the neighborhood in St. Louis, you’re investing in real people. You’re investing in possibilities. You’re investing in hope.”
She drew a connection to Martin Luther King Jr., the civil rights leader who was shot and killed in 1968 at the Lorraine Motel, since remodeled into the museum where the panel took place. “His vision was my life, people like me growing up in those impoverished communities — having opportunities to break out of those cycles of poverty.”
Panelist David Bowers has spent years working on affordable housing issues as an executive with Enterprise Community Partners Inc., but he said not everyone believes affordable housing is a problem worth solving.
“(If) I’m white, I don’t want black folk living around me. (If) I’m black. I don’t want poor black people living around me.” He called for honest conversations to help communities deal with these underlying fears.
The panelists also talked about ways to address affordable housing and related problems of poverty.
Rose said PolicyLink is working to build up poor people’s power through steps such as creating tenants’ associations.
Kathryn Edin, a Princeton University professor, spoke about a program called Moving to Opportunity that helped people in low-income neighborhoods move to better ones. She said children affected by the program had made big progress.
“They’re showing an inter-generational leap forward. That’s phenomenal. It’s worth it.”
Bowers cautioned it’s also important to help build up neighborhoods no matter where they are.
Christopher Herbert, managing director of the joint center for Housing Studies at Harvard University, said society should remove barriers such as bad public transportation that prevent people from getting to work.
“I think there’s too much presumption that the poor don’t want to work,” he said. “The poor want to work – there’s just a lot of things in their way.”