Woman fights for fair housing for more than 50 years

WOODLAND PARK » When President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Fair Housing Act into law in 1968, Lee Porter, who had been battling housing discrimination in Bergen County for years, thought she would have to return to her career as a licensed X-ray technician.

Instead, Porter, now 91, is still fighting for equal housing in New Jersey 50 years later as the executive director of the Fair Housing Council of Northern New Jersey.

“We are still hanging on in there; we are still fighting,” she said in a recent interview in her office in Hackensack. “It makes me feel like a failure, because I felt we should have conquered this a long time ago. It should have been equal opportunity in housing within 25 years, and we are still fighting it.

“We thought we were going to win this battle fast,” Porter said. “It’s happening, but not fast enough.”

The Fair Housing Act, which Johnson signed days after Martin Luther King Jr. was killed, outlawed housing discrimination on the basis of race, color, disability, religion, sex, familial status or national origin. It also aimed to eliminate residential segregation.

On Friday, Porter and other employees of the Fair Housing Council of Northern New Jersey, a nonprofit founded in 1959, celebrated the anniversary at a picnic in Hackensack. Among the participants was Sen. Cory Booker, whose family was helped by the nonprofit agency when they searched for a house in Bergen County in 1969.

“Lee was a hero in our house,” he said after taking a selfie with Porter to send to his mother. “All of my life, one of the greatest heroes I have — that includes Martin Luther King and it includes . Fannie

Lou Hamer, Harriet Tubman — but ... I have to say, one of the titans in my life is Lee Porter. I feel so blessed by her. The whole trajectory of my family was changed by her love and her activism, and those who stood with her and worked with her during those times.”

Porter has seen the impact that housing discrimination can have on families in New Jersey, and how it has evolved since she started out as a volunteer helping minorities, most of them African-American, find homes.

In the 1960s and 1970s, she said, discrimination was blatant and based mostly on race. Today, it remains pernicious, but it takes more subtle forms, such as real estate agents showing fewer available properties and apartments to minorities than to equally qualified whites.

Contemporary complaints also go beyond race. The organization now investigates a mix of allegations of unfair treatment toward gays and lesbians, people with disabilities, and families who rely on subsidies to pay their rent.

“Race and color has diminished a bit as far as the complaints are concerned, but not the degree of discrimination,” Porter said.