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Foreshadowing the Civil Rights Counter-Revolution

Congress and the Fair Housing Act of 1968

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 November 2021

Jeffery A. Jenkins  and
Justin Peck
Jeffery A. Jenkins*
Affiliation:
Price School of Public Policy, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA
Justin Peck
Affiliation:
Department of Government, Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT, USA
*
*Corresponding author. Email: jajenkins@usc.edu
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Abstract

After overseeing the adoption of two landmark civil rights proposals in 1964 and 1965, the Johnson administration and its allies in Congress sought to implement the third item of its broader agenda: a legal prohibition on racial discrimination in the sale and rental of housing. Enacting fair housing legislation, however, proved to be a vexing process. Advocates had to win support from northern White Democrats skeptical of the policy, as well as Republicans who were often (and increasingly) unreliable allies. Fair housing legislation failed in 1966 (89th Congress) but passed two years later, during the 90th Congress. We provide a legislative policy history detailing how, after three tumultuous years, Congress came to enact the fair housing provision of the Civil Rights Act of 1968. Overall, the battle to enact fair housing legislation presaged a dynamic that would take hold as the Great Society gave way to the Nixon years: once federal civil rights policies started to bear directly on the lives of White northerners, they became much harder to pass and implement. It also showcased the moment at which the Republican Party in Congress first moved to the right on civil rights and explicitly adopted a position of racial conservatism.

Keywords

Civil RightsFair HousingCongressLegislation1960s
Type
State of the Art
Information
Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race , Volume 19 , Issue 2 , Fall 2022 , pp. 329 - 356
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Hutchins Center for African and African American Research

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