3

THE “HOLLOW PROSPECT” OF INTEGRATION

The integration and community development debate is as old as federally subsidized housing for lower-income families. In the United States a concerted effort to provide subsidized housing for the poor was initiated with the public housing program in 1937, and the first units began to be occupied as the 1930s came to a close. Before that program was ten years old there was debate within the black community about where such housing should be built and whether its primary effect was to provide much-needed housing for the community or to perpetuate patterns of residential segregation.

Both fair housing activism and community development evolved from racial activism of the mid-twentieth century. In fact, the evolution of this debate unfolds in the overlapping threads of three movements: the civil right campaign led by blacks demanding equality of opportunity and integration in all phases of life, the open housing struggle concerned with breaking down barriers to residential integration, and the black nationalist movement that stressed self-sufficiency and community control for the black community. As each of these movements matured and gained its greatest influence in the mid-twentieth century, the spatial debate in affordable housing crystallized. In most respects, the open housing movement was an echo of the larger civil rights effort, asserting the larger movement’s integrationist objectives within the context of both housing markets and government housing strategies. Black nationalism contested the integration ideal of the civil rights movement, arguing for black self-sufficiency and, in its more radical forms, a degree of separatism and independence from white society. In terms of housing strategies this meant achieving goals of adequate and affordable housing within the black community rather than relying on the strategies of dispersal and integration. It also meant community control of housing as an economic asset that would help enhance the economic capacity of the black community.

The mid-twentieth century American ghetto was the central fact around which these opposing positions were formed. For integrationists, the ghetto represented the constraints placed on blacks by the larger white society. The ghetto was a physical manifestation of racial oppression in the country and the chief means by which racial inequality was maintained and recreated. As such, the ghetto was an institution to be done away with. Equal rights and civil rights demanded the dismantling of the ghetto and the entry of blacks as equal actors into all communities. Black nationalists also, of course, recognized the racial oppression that was behind the inferior public and private services that characterized the ghetto, and the blatant and violent forms of discrimination that created and reproduced the poverty and marginalization of the ghetto. Nevertheless, they also saw the ghetto as the indispensable home to black cultural life and community, and thus defined the objectives of racial justice in terms of improving housing and economic conditions there, while enhancing self-sufficiency, building political and economic power, and preserving the identity of the community.

Early Voices

As long as there has been federal policy related to low-income housing, there has been a debate within the black community about what such policy would mean for it. As long as there have been large-scale efforts, federal or otherwise, aimed at redeveloping the nation’s urban areas, blacks have been concerned about what such efforts would do to their communities. The issue of race has dominated both housing policy and urban redevelopment policy from the outset. Large-scale efforts on the part of the federal government to influence the housing market and to provide housing assistance to the poor began in earnest during the New Deal era of the 1930s. The New Deal programs of support for homeownership, notably the FHA and VA programs that introduced federal backing for mortgages and led to a vast expansion of homeownership during the 1930s to the 1950s, explicitly incorporated racially discriminatory guidelines that systematically disadvantaged black communities.1 The New Deal program of support for lower-income rental housing, the public housing program, also incorporated explicitly racial guidelines that ensured segregation.2 Beyond the program guidelines, however, the issue of race dominated the way in which the public conceived of the programs, the ways in which intended beneficiaries experienced the programs, and the ways in which the programs affected American cities during the mid-century period.

Within the black community the questions regarding housing and redevelopment have focused on whether such programs should be encouraged as a source of much-needed investment from a government that more typically ignores conditions within black neighborhoods, or regarded as further efforts to maintain systems of segregation, discrimination, and oppression. Similarly, was urban renewal to be seen as a way of breaking down segregation and expanding neighborhood choices for blacks, or was it an attempt to displace blacks from valuable inner-city areas? Descriptions of mid-century black urban politics reveal these debates within the black community.3

In Chicago, for example, there were clear lines between factions on these issues. Robert Weaver, who would go on in 1965 to become the first African American to hold a cabinet-level position in the federal government as the first secretary of HUD, was a prominent member of what Preston Smith III calls a black policy elite that pushed the integrationist agenda. This group included other federal housing officials such as George Nesbitt and William Hill. The integrationists in Chicago felt that they were responding to what they regarded as the “vested interests of the ghetto defense faction.”4 The “ghetto defense faction,” according to the integrationists, included local black politicians who owed their position to the unified voting bloc of blacks that resulted from residential segregation of the population, black business leaders who feared integration because it would mean greater competition and loss of business, and “the lower-income and tenant masses” whose shortsighted perspective (in the eyes of the integrationists) led them to favor black concentration.

On the issue of redevelopment, there was little expectation among members of either side of this debate that renewal efforts would provide housing needed by working-class and lower-income blacks. In fact, the predominant pattern at that time was for urban renewal and redevelopment to reduce the amount of housing available to such groups. Thus, among black leaders, redevelopment was assessed more for what it would mean for residential patterns. Non-integrationists, those labeled the “ghetto defense faction” by Weaver and his allies, were concerned that renewal would mean displacement and removal of the black community from the urban core. These leaders felt the need to mobilize the community “to consolidate [its] position near the heart of American cities.”5 Indeed, even a strong integrationist like Weaver in 1948 called redevelopment in Chicago a triple threat to the black community in that it could displace blacks, break up strong but racially identified neighborhoods, and further restrict the living space available to blacks in northern cities.6 In the end, however, Weaver was influenced more by the “opportunity” that he felt redevelopment provided, thinking that it would, in the end, open up new settlement areas for blacks and help to relieve the spatial pressure of the ghetto.

At the time, the only form of subsidized low-income housing was the federal public housing program, and so it was in the context of this program that debates about the impact of subsidized housing and about where it should be placed began. By the 1950s, local public housing authorities in Chicago and elsewhere were building much public housing in predominantly minority neighborhoods as part of slum clearance efforts. As the program was becoming more racially identified through the 1950s in cities across the country, there was opposition to its placement in white areas or in greenfield locations on the periphery of cities.7 James Q. Wilson’s study of black political leadership in Chicago in the late 1950s captures the dilemma faced by the black community leaders in these years who recognized the need for better housing among its residents, but also feared the long-term impact of concentrating such housing within the community. Chicago public housing was heavily clustered in black neighborhoods.8 Some in the black political establishment objected to this (as well as to what they felt were sterile and unattractive designs that contained those units within mostly high-rise buildings) even as housing needs were so great. “Such a choice—to oppose further public housing and to work instead for desegregation that would permit it to be scattered—is a hard one,” wrote Wilson, “and most Negro leaders are not prepared to make it. Most hope that both ends can be served simultaneously, but if they cannot, then one must take what one can get.”9

Thus, leaders in the black community “found it difficult to reject much-needed low-income housing” even when it was placed within the ghetto.10 Though Chicago is the paradigmatic example of how local politics concentrated public housing in black neighborhoods, the pattern was repeated in most U.S. cities.11 Another of James Q. Wilson’s Chicago sources said, “If I had to make a choice, and I don’t always think you do, between more public housing or putting it in integrated areas, I would favor putting up more housing.... There is a real need.”12 Wilson quotes a black newspaper editor: “We think that public housing is wrong the way it’s being handled.... But if we come out against it hard, then they’ll just not build it anywhere, and that would be worse. So what do we do? We just mumble about it.”13

The tension between further housing in black neighborhoods or dispersal strategies hinged mostly on the issue of immediate needs versus devotion to a longer-term vision of integrated residential patterns. The idea that building housing in the black community could be more than simply a means of meeting desperate needs, that it in fact might be part of a positive strategy of building community capacity, of protecting and maintaining the unity and strength of the community, would not emerge fully and strongly until the 1960s.

Open Housing, Fair Housing

The fair housing movement, the political struggle to combat racial discrimination in housing and end blatant practices of residential segregation, began in the 1940s. It was in its earliest stages a highly decentralized movement of activists working at the local level in communities across the nation.14 Fair housing emerged at a time when overt racial discrimination was a routine part of the housing market, when racially defined ghettos were a central feature of most American cities, and when the suburbs were homogeneously white and middle class. The movement reflected these three realities. The goals of the movement were often expressed in terms of phrases like “open housing,” which was meant to describe a situation in which skin color, ethnicity, or religion would not preclude anyone who had the desire and the resources to do so from entering any community. “Open housing,” furthermore, referred to the goal of breaking down the exclusionary barriers that communities erected in order to maintain racial and class homogeneity. From the 1940s into the 1960s, such barriers were widespread, including restrictive zoning and land-use regulations, and the common practices of real estate professionals in maintaining the color lines in American communities.15

Thus, at the outset the effort was known as the “open housing” movement.16 The strategy was twofold: the elimination of discrimination in housing markets that kept African Americans largely clustered in racially identified neighborhoods, and the accessibility of black families to neighborhoods that were predominantly white, neighborhoods that through discrimination had been essentially off-limits. These two elements, nondiscrimination and integration, were for almost two decades assumed to be equivalent. The diagnosis of racially dual housing markets that preoccupied the movement throughout its early history was that they were created and maintained by discrimination. The end of that discrimination, it was assumed, would produce integrated living patterns. Throughout the 1950s there was not a sense that these two objectives were independent of each other or that they may, under some circumstances, conflict. In fact, it can be said that from the outset the movement had a discrimination focus with integrationist assumptions. The earliest policy prescriptions advanced by national and local activists were to simply ban discrimination. There was faith that this would lead to integration.

The open housing movement achieved its first successes at the local level. According to a historian of the movement, Juliet Saltman, the most active and advanced early efforts took place in New York City. New York is, in fact, where the campaign experienced its first major success when, in 1951, the New York City Council passed an ordinance banning discrimination in city-assisted housing. New York City was, at the time, building a large number of subsidized units under its own auspices, and thus the ban was not mere window dressing, but applied to the largest subsidized housing initiative in the nation. Early open housing advocates wanted to make federal funding of local governments contingent upon local commitment to open housing. In the 1950s they proposed to withhold federal funds and assistance from local governments that practiced or supported racial segregation in housing and public facilities.17 Both these ideas would eventually become part of federal policy, illustrating a common dynamic in fair housing policy in which practices first emerge at the local level and become national policy only after years of operation in a more decentralized manner.18

An early success of the movement was its victory convincing the developer of Stuyvesant Town, a large residential development on Manhattan’s east side, to adopt a nondiscriminatory rental policy, allowing blacks to compete for all the units. In the end, blacks did not exactly embrace that particular opportunity, foreshadowing a problem that the integrationist agenda would face many times as the decades wore on. As historian Nicholas von Hoffman reports, “tenant leaders had assumed ‘that blacks would welcome the chance to step up into a white world,’ but they later realized that ‘evidence contradicted the myth.’”19

Over time, the focus on “open communities” took on a third dimension as the discourse surrounding black ghettos began to stress social pathology, and the ghetto was depicted as the location where the negative outcomes of enforced racial oppression were manifest and spatially concentrated. By the end of the 1950s and more so during the 1960s, the black ghetto became something that required a solution. Indeed, the open housing movement at this time made reference to “the establishment of a community-wide pattern of open occupancy as the only answer to the ghetto ” (emphasis added).20 Activists directly attributed the deplorable living conditions within the ghetto to discrimination.21 It was the substandard housing, inferior or nonexistent public services, and employment discrimination and inequality within the American ghetto that most directly mobilized the racial justice efforts of this era.

The movement created a national organization in 1950 when the National Committee against Discrimination in Housing (NCDH) formed. It was an umbrella organization of fifteen groups that had been working on the issues of housing discrimination and segregation, including the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and the Anti-Defamation League. Though NCDH provided a national infrastructure for open housing advocacy, the movement remained a highly decentralized effort for most of the 1950s and 1960s.22 Indeed, by the time a federal fair housing bill (the Fair Housing Act) was passed by Congress in 1968, there were 153 fair housing laws across the nation at the state and local levels. Even in the first three months after the 1968 Fair Housing Act, 100 more local laws were passed.23

The earliest accomplishments of the open housing movement locally were in influencing the actions of public-sector housing agencies. Despite the legislative successes at the local level in the 1950s, there remained during this time widespread political support for allowing property owners to dispose (by sale or rent) of their properties as they deemed fit, including allowing for the intentional differential treatment of people according to skin color, religion, and other characteristics. In the face of these entrenched beliefs, those in the open housing movement redirected their efforts to seek to address discrimination in publicly assisted housing. NCDH, for example, claimed during this period that federal housing programs, chiefly public housing and the FHA mortgage insurance programs, were reinforcing segregation. President John F. Kennedy’s Executive Order 11063, issued in 1962, the first major federal policy proclamation in the fight against racial discrimination in housing, was a response to the advocacy efforts of NCDH.24

The momentum for targeting white communities and the private housing market picked up during the second phase of the open housing movement, which Saltman places between 1956 and 1964. In this period NCDH successfully pressed for passage of city and state laws banning discrimination in both publicly assisted and private housing. In 1956 only three states and fourteen cities had laws prohibiting discrimination in housing, though other cities had narrower laws focused on assisted housing or redevelopment areas. As the 1950s wore on, NCDH began to focus on the need to pry open previously white-only neighborhoods in order to provide greater housing choice to minorities, to loosen the grip of the ghetto on black families, and to create more integrated living patterns.

The focus on open housing during this period also began to implicate suburban communities in the larger metropolitan-wide pattern of segregation that characterized most regions. In the late 1950s, for example, the Detroit NAACP organized protests against racial segregation in the region’s suburban communities. In October 1959, NCDH’s newsletter, Trends, called for county-level action and the reduction of barriers to black residency in the suburbs.

The movement remained largely a local one as the 1960s started, with the continued formation of grassroots organizations across the country promoting integration and open occupancy.25 The question of open housing, however, was pulled into a bigger debate within the black community, a growing schism between the integrationist goals of the mainstream civil rights movement and the community-control orientation of black nationalism.

Civil Rights and Black Nationalism

The U.S. civil rights movement first began to emerge in the 1940s. Of course, efforts to achieve greater racial equality date back many years before that. W. E. B. Du Bois organized the Niagara Movement in 1905 as a reaction to the more accommodationist strategies of some black leaders at the turn of the century. The NAACP formed in 1909 and began its efforts to achieve justice and integration for blacks in all aspects of American life. In 1916 Marcus Garvey began to spread his message of racial unity and black pride, introducing in the process a model of racial equality that did not depend on integrationist aspirations.

The 1930s and ’40s saw an increasing rate of direct action on behalf of civil rights and labor concerns.26 Sit-ins and boycotts, tactics that would become a staple of the movement twenty years later, were first pursued during the ’30s and ’40s.27 The organizational capacity of black civil rights activism was also growing during this period, laying the foundation for the mass movement that was to come. The NAACP initiated its legal strategy aimed at dismantling the web of laws and customs that made up the bulwark of segregation in the mid-1930s, and in April 1942 activists in Chicago formed the Committee of Racial Equality (CORE) to fight racial discrimination using nonviolent tactics.28

Concrete examples of progress, however, were few. Episodes of racial violence and the use of firebombs, mob intimidation, bricks, and gunshots to enforce the strict racial boundaries of segregation were common at the time.29 The year 1943 alone saw over 225 incidents of racial violence across the country, including a three-day battle between whites and blacks in Detroit, and a one-day riot in Harlem, again triggered by the arrest of a young black man by local police.30 Entering the 1950s, then, blacks in American cities of the North and the South could recite a familiar litany of poor housing conditions, job discrimination, and segregated public facilities as central realities of life. Throughout the 1950s, black civil rights activists pursued their agenda and continued to build their organizational capacity. Successful bus boycotts in Baton Rouge and Montgomery drew media attention, as did the overblown violence of the southern white reaction. By the early 1960s there were four significant organizations pursuing civil rights for blacks across the country—the NAACP, CORE, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).

Black Nationalism

Another strain of black thought related to racial inequality was developing during the 1940s and ’50s. Activists driven by core ideas of self-sufficiency and self-determination and the development and empowerment of the black community were operating largely within the black neighborhoods of northern cities. As historian Peniel Joseph recounts, “In the 1950s, black nationalists stalked Harlem like itinerant Baptist preachers in search of wayward flocks.”31 None gained the notoriety or following equal to that of the Nation of Islam.

NOI leaders stressed dignity, strict personal behavioral guidelines, and modeled a type of racial identity and pride that was directed not at integrating into the larger white society but at developing a parallel black nation that would provide a different route to economic security and political self-determination. Malcolm X, first appointed as an officer of NOI in 1953, became the most widely recognized spokesman for NOI, and by extension the most widely recognized face of black nationalism. As Malcolm X’s following grew, the ideas of black nationalism began to spread within the black community. By 1959, Malcolm X had been speaking widely on the themes of racial pride, dignity, separatism, and self-sufficiency. Malcolm X’s rhetoric departed sharply from the integrationist ideas of the mainstream civil rights groups at the time. While perhaps jarring to whites, the important differences between the self-sufficiency orientation of nationalism and the integrationist perspective were old features of racial politics for black activists and had been debated internally for years. Malcolm X gave black nationalism a national and charismatic spokesman who would help launch the movement into the wider consciousness of the black community and onto the larger political agenda as well.

Malcolm X’s views on racial justice exhibited a specific local geography, according to historian James Tyner. Malcolm X regarded integration as “a deception”—a kind of political sleight of hand that diverted attention from more fundamental questions of power. “Integration without a change in the underlying attitude of a racist society, for Malcolm X, was a hollow prospect.”32 Malcolm X felt that integration was “another tool of the oppressor, one that retained the basic inequalities in society.”33 As Tyner writes, for Malcolm X “an uncritical acceptance of integration as either a method or an objective served only to reify white supremacy.”34

Yet Malcolm X fiercely attacked the injustices of segregation as well, identifying in it the core dynamics of racial exploitation and oppression. While a spokesman for NOI, Malcolm X talked about separatism, a physical separation of races that would form the basis of black self-determination. After his split from NOI, however, Malcolm X conceived of separatism as more of a political, economic, and cultural project than as one that required strict physical separation. Physical separation was not necessary, he felt, to achieve the goals of racial equality. What was important for social justice was “control of communal resources.”35 Signaling his emphasis on dignity and power over any particular geography of race, Malcolm X said in 1964, “We don’t want to be integrationists. Nor do we want to be separationists. We want to be human beings.”36

Tensions within the Civil Rights Movement

Black Nationalist and mainstream civil rights leaders were solidifying their respective positions on both the appropriate aims and tactics necessary to bring about racial justice. Not only did the nationalists differ with the integrationist aims of the mainstream civil rights movement; they tended to support more aggressive tactics, including self-defense and the possibility of militancy in defense of racial equality. The two movements reflected generational and regional divisions within the black community. The black nationalist movement was largely a northern and urban phenomenon, while the strength of the civil rights movement was in the South and was primarily rural. As the decade wore on, the generational split would become accentuated, with younger activists leaning toward the nationalist ideology while an older generation of activists maintained their integrationist objectives. But even as the decade began, the rift between these two arms of the growing black movement had become widely evident and public, so much so that when SNCC was created in 1960, where it stood on issues of goals (integration or separatism) and tactics (the continued nonviolence of the SCLC and the patient legal strategies of the NAACP on the one hand, or increasingly confrontational rhetoric and direct action on the other) were critical questions for its organizers.37

The unabated violence, however, of white backlash to peaceful civil rights protests, violence that was most often condoned if not abetted by local police authorities, began to eat away at the solid commitment to nonviolence among black activists. White aggression and the hesitancy of white political leaders to support civil rights contributed to a strategic crisis within the movement. Leaders of both CORE and SNCC began to question the fundamental strategy of the civil rights movement of working with the federal government and with white liberals.38 The messages of black pride, self-sufficiency, and resistance to white violence voiced by Malcolm X and other black nationalist leaders began to resonate more widely as civil rights activism was met by continued white intransigence. By the end of 1964, CORE and SNCC had begun to reject not only nonviolence, but the very goal of integration as well.39

In fact, criticism of the mainstream civil rights movement and its leaders became more common among those contemplating a different and more nationalist approach to racial equality. Manning Marable notes that in 1963 “many black nationalists targeted [Martin Luther] King and other more conservative Negro leaders with personal and even physical abuse. In Harlem, black separatists tossed eggs at King after his appearance in a local church.”40 Intellectuals within the black nationalism movement considered the mainstream civil rights movements stalled and lacking answers for the violent intransigence of whites and the hesitancy of public officials.

After reconsidering its position on nonviolence in the year prior, CORE made a break with its white membership in 1964 and shifted to black control.41 That was also the year when the Mississippi Freedom Party went to the Democratic National Convention to challenge the state’s all-white delegation.42 As Joseph notes, the denial of credentials to the Freedom Party delegates provided great clarity for many in the civil rights movement; it was for many a bitter illustration of the limits of working within national political institutions for racial change and equality.43

Black Power

In June 1966, Stokely Carmichael, the twenty-five-year-old chairman of SNCC, was jailed in Greenwood, Mississippi. Carmichael had been with other civil rights leaders on a march through the South. On June 16, he emerged from jail and made a speech introducing a new slogan that was to dominate the rest of civil rights era in the United States, saying to his fellow marchers that from that point forward, their objective was “black power.” The phrase proved to be a lightning rod, generating immediate and intense reaction from both blacks and whites. Among many whites, and in the context of widespread urban unrest, the phrase generated fear. The white media seemed interested above all in what specific objectives were embodied by the phrase, and pressed leaders for explanations of what it meant.44 Although some have criticized the phrase for being too vague, blacks, as Robert Allen notes, “grasped its essence easily.”45 For black activists, black power was a rallying cry, and a précis for the movement. At the CORE convention in the summer of 1966, the group adopted the phrase as its official slogan and announced its independence from the larger, mainstream civil rights movement. SNCC activists also adopted the phrase and, like CORE, considered the importance of a black-led movement with all that implied for working with white allies.

Black power suggested a strategy for civil rights that celebrated the black community while simultaneously identifying the bases of economic and political domination that produced and reproduced racial inequalities. The imprecision of the “black power” phrase allowed much to be read into it. It could accommodate interpretations that emphasized self-sufficiency, whether expressed as political power or economic self-determination; black power, however, was powerful also for its cultural message and content. It expressed racial pride and generated the development of cultural expressions, including a rapid expansion of literary, musical, and artistic output that celebrated blackness in a society that otherwise largely devalued it.46

For their part, the mainstream civil rights leaders were vocal in denouncing black separatists as impractical extremists, suggesting that their efforts were merely the outgrowth of impatience and the result of the slow pace of progress toward racial equality. The SCLC and the NAACP attempted to fight the radicalizing developments of black nationalism, the aggressive rhetoric of Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, and others who emerged around this time such as Huey Newton, H. Rap Brown, and Eldridge Cleaver. The civil rights mainstream did not embrace this vision but instead continued to insist that integration in both a broad and narrow sense was the only way of achieving economic and political parity. The mainstream questioned the idea of “separate but equal” that was implied in the black power vision. Civil rights leaders Roger Wilkins, Martin Luther King Jr., and Andrew Young publicly dissociated themselves from the black power movement, fearing in part that the increasing militancy of the movement was damaging the cause of racial inequality rather than serving it.47

In many ways, however, the appeal of black power had eclipsed the efforts of mainstream civil rights activism. Indeed, Robert Allen considered the mainstream civil rights movement to be “in its death throes” by the middle of 1966. On the West Coast, the Black Panthers were founded in the fall of 1966 in Oakland, California, adopting a message of black self-sufficiency as well as an image of militancy and armed self-defense.48 The Panthers offered a ten-point platform of demands for racial justice and adopted an aggressive public persona, including armed patrols that would monitor police action in the black community. In Los Angeles, another nationalist group, US Organization, emerged in 1965 pursuing a strongly cultural version of black nationalism. The mood of the times and the enthusiasm of black activism were with the idea of black power. As Joseph notes, “as the decade proceeded, Black Power, rather than civil rights, framed public perception” of the black movement more generally.49

Before too long, the representatives of the older, mainstream wing of the black movement came to see power in the slogan, and acknowledged its importance in engendering and celebrating black pride. By the end of 1967, both Dr. King and the SCLC as an organization had embraced the themes of racial pride and cultural expression.

More urban riots, which had been taking place with regularity since 1964, occurred in 1967, including significant ones in Newark, Detroit, and Minneapolis. In the following year the riot season, which had typically been from June to September, moved forward two months when the assassination of Martin Luther King triggered widespread rebellions across the country.50 In May 1968, armed Black Panther members protested outside the California capitol building. The FBI ramped up efforts to disrupt the black power movement and to sow dissent within it.51 Rivalries and violence within the movement were fomented and aggravated by the FBI, and armed confrontations occurred between activists and police, and between rival groups of activists.52

Armored Tanks and Think Tanks

The path of the civil rights movement, its internal debates as well as the emergence of black power as an organizing concept, was conditioned in part by the response of white citizens and leaders. The reaction of white residents of the nation’s cities was to use the choice available to them in the housing market and remove themselves from large portions of the central city.53 The response of many whites to black power and the increasing resistance of the black community to continued oppression was fairly typical of the actions of a dominant group in the face of increasingly violent actions of an oppressed minority: fear. The white population fell precipitously in most cities during the 1960s and well into the 1970s.54 This development was a continuation of postwar trends of suburbanization that initially were about the growing housing opportunities of suburbs versus older city neighborhoods, but quickly came to be about the flight of whites away from growing concentrations of blacks in the urban core. During these years, then, the dominant geographic pattern of American metropolitan areas came to be a significant minority population in the center surrounded by largely lily-white suburbs.55 This “doughnut” pattern was mirrored by the pattern of private and public investment as the movement of jobs also accelerated outward, and suburban shopping malls were built to service the changing geography of purchasing power within metro areas. The population within many U.S. cities declined as whites moved out. Schools, parks, transportation (typically roads and highways) investment in suburban areas replaced urban investment. It was this “white noose” around the central cities that became the subject of much political and social concern, and indeed the target of the fair housing movement, as the 1960s ended and as an uneasy peace settled upon the black ghetto.56

To public officials, the rapid development of black nationalism represented a more threatening set of objectives and strategies than those of the more traditional civil rights movement. The riots of the 1960s only added to the jitteriness of white politicians and white residents of urban areas. The policy response nationally and locally, then, was a mixture of restrictive criminal justice and military reactions to actual and potential urban unrest and racial violence on the one hand, and, on the other, programs aimed at ameliorating poverty based on the latest thinking of social scientists about the cause and spread of race-based inequality. It was, in a phrase, a mixture of armored tanks and think tanks.

The deployment of National Guard troops and the heavy martial presence brought down on American ghettos included the movement of troop carriers and tanks. Robert Allen notes that “after the 1967 rebellions, the development and production of antiriot and exotic weaponry became a booming industry.”57 The response to urban riots included the modification of armored personnel carriers for police use. The first deployment of National Guard troops in a northern city was in Rochester, New York, in 1964. Troops were also deployed in the 1965 Watts rebellion, and over the next three years in Cleveland, Omaha, Detroit, Minneapolis, Newark, Baltimore, Chicago, and Washington, DC. Local governments also resorted more often to control tactics such as curfews to manage the local population.

While military tanks patrolled some American cities during the period of unrest, think tanks were taking their aim at the ghetto as well. A range of policy experiments and philanthropic efforts were being developed at this time, incorporating new ideas for delivering services to the poor, increasing the participation of the recipients of government aid, and empowering poor residents of ghetto neighborhoods. Many of these ideas were incubated by philanthropies before finding their way into federal policy. The leading effort in addressing the conditions of ghetto poverty was undertaken by the Ford Foundation. Its Gray Areas program, begun in 1961, experimented with alternative ways of delivering services in poor, urban neighborhoods. The foundation also made program investments in economic development and community development initiatives throughout this period, innovating ideas related to job training, minority business development and ownership programs, and support for community development corporations. Ford had committed itself to the “task of achieving full domestic equality for all American Negroes.”58

Community Control and Development

Provisions for “community control” contained in several of President Lyndon Johnson’s “War on Poverty” programs aligned closely with calls for greater black community control over the economic and political resources that were shaping ghetto conditions. Theories of poverty had long contained the idea that a lack of “community competence” contributed to the development and reproduction of poverty.59 Policy reformers both inside and outside the federal government adapted that idea by experimenting with notions of the participation of “indigenous” populations in programs designed to address the social and economic needs of ghetto residents. The Ford Foundation’s Gray Areas program encouraged community participation while still retaining a very top-down flow of resources and program authority. But in the political ferment of the early 1960s, the idea of indigenous participation took hold and grew beyond its original and limited form. In part this was because it aligned well with the growing activism of minority groups in U.S. cities across the nation. When Johnson declared his War on Poverty in 1964, ideas of community action animated many of the programs. In the fall of 1964, the newly created Office of Economic Opportunity made its first round of Community Action Program grants, aggressively funding organizing efforts in the nation’s poorest communities as an integral part of its antipoverty objectives. But community action meant different things to different actors. Social service providers tended to see it as a means of co-delivery of services, blurring the client-expert distinction in hopes of more effective service provision. Local politicians saw community action as a means of building consensus without necessarily sacrificing the top-down flow of program control and authority. But for activists, community action was an opportunity to organize political power within the community, to challenge the sclerotic and exploitive power relations that they felt had contributed to extreme conditions of deprivation within low-income and ghetto neighborhoods.60

Community Development Corporations

The creation of community development corporations (CDCs) was one concrete manifestation of these efforts to experiment with community action and community control.61 In 1966, Congress passed an amendment to the Equal Opportunity Act called the Special Impact Program (SIP). SIP provided for a new type of organization, one that would combine the political goals of community control and local leadership on the one hand with the ownership and control of economic and financial assets on the other. The goal of these CDCs was to improve conditions within black communities. These activists enlisted images of community strength and self-determination in which blacks would own the economic assets of land and capital, replacing absentee and exploitive ownership with a system in which local ownership, consisting of local activists and accountable to local residents, would invest and reinvest within the community, channeling and recycling assets for the benefit of local residents.

The SIP program was the brainchild of New York senator Robert Kennedy, and it constituted Kennedy’s alternative approach to Johnson’s War on Poverty.62 Indeed, by 1966, the central Johnson administration initiative related to community action, CAP, had sparked enormous controversy and political struggle in dozens of localities across the country, and was immediately reined in by program architects. Some of the early organizing efforts of CAP, including the funding of black street gangs to lead antipoverty efforts, generated significant political backlash and negative press coverage for the agency. By the end of 1965, support for community organizing had been de-emphasized in favor of a more mainstream service provision model and local government control.63

The community development corporations created by SIP would do more than simply implement federal antipoverty programs and do more than channel services to low-income people. They were meant to move beyond the clientelism of the War on Poverty to generate new economic power in disadvantaged neighborhoods, a power based on economic strength, controlled by community members and deployed on behalf of objectives aimed at further developing and consolidating the political and economic self-sufficiency of ghetto neighborhoods.

In the beginning, then, CDCs were equal part political and economic entities. Their existence and their agenda called forth a new vision of antipoverty work, one that would replace absentee landlordism that extracted profits from the community and provided subpar (if not outright dangerous and unhealthy) housing with responsive ownership and management that provided better-quality and more-affordable housing while keeping the wealth generated by landownership within the community. It meant new businesses oriented toward employing residents, providing job and career skills training. The CDCs were, according to John T. Baker, “efforts of leaders within low-income, predominantly black communities to create institutions through which residents of low-income communities could exercise control over important social, political, and economic resources both within and beyond the boundaries of their communities.”64 This formula came the closest of any federally sponsored antipoverty program to operationalizing the black power agenda. Stokely Carmichael’s definition of the phrase emphasizes, above all, black control and leadership over the institutions affecting daily life. “Black people must lead and run their own organizations,” he and Charles Hamilton wrote in Black Power.65 But beyond the visibility of black leadership, they wrote, “the power must be that of a community, and emanate from there.”66 While much of Carmichael and Hamilton’s book is devoted to political power, strategic political objectives, and the repositioning of black political activism within the structure of electoral politics, Carmichael and Hamilton also describe the colonial economic relationships between black communities and the larger white society. They accept Kenneth Clark’s description of economic colonization of black communities, described in his book Dark Ghetto, that highlights the white ownership of assets within the black community and the flow of assets out of the community as whites “take their profits home.”67

Within the black power movement there was a debate over economic strategy. While more radical elements within the movement advocated a rejection of both white economic domination and capitalist domination, other elements within the black movement of the 1960s focused more narrowly on the development of economic power within the black community and greater black participation in the economy. There were those who located black oppression in the exclusion of the black community from effective participation in the economy. For these people, greater levels of black economic ownership and activity, what came to be called “black capitalism,” was the answer. CORE, for example, was an early adopter of the notion that the black community needed to build its own economic power, and the Ford Foundation was a significant funder of economic initiatives aimed at building black capitalism.68 In 1968, the two organizations joined efforts to pursue redevelopment efforts in the Hough neighborhood of Cleveland.

At the same time, however, a significant part of the black power movement had adopted a more radical economic analysis, suggesting that black oppression was part of a larger and systematic framework of oppression constructed by the capitalist system itself.69 Nishani Frazier argues that CDCs emerged as a middle ground between those who favored greater black participation in the existing economic system and the more radical and anticapitalist Marxist views that represented another strain of black power thought.70

First-Generation CDCs

The initial generation of CDCs emerged in the major urban areas of the North. The Bedford Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation (BSRC) in New York City was the first. BSRC was supported by the initial allocation of funds under the SIP program. While it did a significant amount of work to renew and improve physical conditions within the neighborhood, BSRC emphasized community organizing and the development of shared ownership models.71 Other first-generation CDCs emerged where significant urban uprisings had occurred, including the Hough Area Development Corporation created in Cleveland after the six-day riot in that neighborhood in 1966, and CDCs in Newark in the aftermath of the 1967 riots there. As with the BSRC, these CDCs focused on business development and on improving physical conditions within their neighborhoods while simultaneously expressing the community organizing and political development objectives of the black power movement.72

These early CDCs worked in multiple arenas, pursuing economic development and job creation as well as housing development. The focus was on controlling capital and investment within the neighborhood in ways that would immediately improve the lives of residents, upgrade neighborhood conditions, and lay the foundation for growing economic self-sufficiency and build capacity for political self-determination. The CDC model aligned well with black power objectives, but it also embodied an indictment of top-down, government-led urban renewal initiatives, which were seen as ineffective in black communities and, in many cases, actually detrimental to local black interests and resident concerns.73

CDCs were also an attempt to take the initiative in improving living conditions within the ghetto away from government renewal agencies that were seen as impersonal and distant. As many critics have pointed out, both during the era of urban renewal and since, government renewal efforts were frequently regressive and tended to damage local communities, sometimes eradicating them, rather than supporting and strengthening them. The urban renewal program specifically worsened housing conditions within the ghetto and destroyed more low-cost housing than it ever produced. Its displacement effects on black households became in fact its defining characteristic. CDCs were the preferred method for many in the racial equality movement to address the substandard conditions of the ghetto.

The first generation of CDCs, thus, was located within the politics of black power and as a response to ghetto marginalization and the political and economic position of the black community. Housing was central to the CDC formula and was pursued because it produced three benefits of value to black activists. First it provided an important upgrading of physical conditions and living environment within the ghetto. Second, it provided a concrete benefit to ghetto residents in the form of affordable and safe housing, both of which were greatly lacking. Finally, it was a form of development that created economic assets that could be owned and controlled by and within the community rather than by absentee, external, and typically white investors.74 Hill and Rabig call CDCs “one of the Black freedom movement’s most enduring legacies.”75

Kerner Commission

Facing a fourth consecutive summer of ghetto rioting in America’s cities, President Johnson in 1967 appointed a National Commission on Civil Disorders. Known as the Kerner Commission after its chair, former Illinois governor Otto Kerner, the eleven-member body was charged with examining the scale of rioting that had been occurring since 1964 and determining the causes and possible means of preventing the disorders. The commission took note of the two prevailing ideas about how to deal with conditions in black communities: ghetto enrichment and residential integration. In general, while noting the value of enrichment activities, the report’s conclusions leaned heavily toward integration as the best solution to riots and to the state of race relations in the country. The commission famously concluded that “nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.”76 Thus, it favored what it called the only policy option that conceives of the possibility of a single, unified nation, and that was the integration option. In fact, the commission considered enrichment suitable only as a short-term strategy that could ameliorate conditions within the black ghetto while the business of integration was proceeding. Furthermore, the commission was aware of the effect that federally subsidized housing had had on patterns of segregation and called for “a new thrust” in federal housing programs “aimed at overcoming the prevailing patterns of racial segregation.”77

In this respect, then, the commission’s report was in line with the mainstream civil rights movement and mainstream thought within the fair housing movement. The commission’s report was published in March 1968, less than one month before the assassination of Martin Luther King and subsequent passage of the Fair Housing Act.

Housing and Civil Rights

Throughout the period in which the civil rights movement had emerged and grown, the fair housing movement had largely tracked it. Open housing activists mirrored the larger civil rights movement in calling for an end to sanctioned discrimination in housing, the racially dual housing market, and for the end of government actions that supported or deepened patterns of racial segregation. The working assumption of the movement was that rectifying private and public acts of discrimination would lead to integrated living patterns—that is, the two objectives were not only compatible, but in practice the same. The assumption that blacks would choose integration when given greater housing choice was largely unquestioned, until the emergence of black nationalism and the black power movement.

Black Power and the Housing Question

Paradoxically, housing was both a central part of the civil rights movement and in some senses quite peripheral. The scourge of residential segregation was reflected, of course, in the development of the black ghetto and in the limited housing choices available to blacks, and these were among the most central animating concerns of blacks in the civil rights era. The Kerner Commission noted, for example, that inadequate and sometimes dangerous housing conditions were among the important grievances that gave rise to the ghetto rebellions of the decade. In another sense, violence over the maintenance of the color line in residential patterns, violence that was typically initiated by whites, had been common for decades.78 The strict spatial containment of housing that was available to blacks, and the poor conditions of that housing, were the baseline and background reality that conditioned much of the interaction between whites and blacks in northern cities. Yet, at the same time, very little of the mainstream civil rights activism was aimed at housing issues. Sit-ins over access to public facilities were quite common, but direct action to assert housing rights were less so. Jill Quadagno reports that of 181 protests related to segregation by civil rights organizations between 1966 and 1970, only 12 focused on the issue of housing.79 The housing issue to those preoccupied with equal access and the end to segregation was, it seems, a fairly simple matter. SCLC, in fact, stated in 1967 that the problem of housing discrimination would be easily solved by a presidential administrative order making it illegal.80

The most prominent example of where the larger civil rights movement and open housing came together was in Dr. King’s open housing campaign in Chicago in 1966–1967. Called the Chicago Freedom Movement, it brought together local activists and organizers from SCLC, and focused both on improving conditions in the city’s slums and on opening up the housing market in exclusionary communities.

Though civil rights in the arena of housing had for years been defined as the pursuit of integration and the opening up of new communities for black settlement, as the 1960s wore on the integrationist/nationalist debate began to be reflected within the open housing movement. The ideas of community control, black nationalism, black power, and black pride undermined the unquestioning pursuit of integration and suggested that upgrading housing within the black community was an equal if not preferred civil rights objective. Thus, as the civil rights debate transformed into a discussion about the legitimacy and self-sufficiency of the black community, the open housing movement similarly detoured from a focus on discrimination to questions of the status of the black ghetto.

The major fault line within the black community, as always, was on the question of where assisted housing should be placed. For integrationists, the priority for assisted housing was to see it move out of the ghetto and into predominantly white communities. For black power advocates, better housing was needed to preserve and enhance black communities. Insofar as the black power movement questioned the very desirability of integration, the black power position on the housing question was rich with conceptual and strategic questions about the contribution of good housing to community vitality and strength. For Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, and others, the cause of community decline was “exploiters [who] come into the ghetto from outside, bleed it dry, and leave it economically dependent on the larger society.”81 This includes those who own and manage critical assets such as the housing stock of the ghetto, which is allowed to be maintained at a substandard level, although residents are required to pay more than whites in other parts of the city. Black power advocates made a strong call for self-reliance and building economic power within the ghetto. This meant black ownership of housing assets and businesses.

Black power also critiqued the larger civil rights movement for its acceptance of “the middle-class values and institutions of this country... without fully realizing their racist nature.”82 “The goals of integrationists,” wrote Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton in Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America, “are middle-class goals, articulated primarily by a small group of Negroes with middle-class aspiration or status. Their kind of integration has meant that a few blacks ‘make it,’ leaving the black community, sapping it of leadership potential and know-how.”83 This class dimension of the black power movement pushed it toward new forms of economic and political participation. Businesses that simply replaced white owners with black owners but continued to perpetuate the same economic oppression over ghetto residents were not the answer, according to black power leaders. Similarly, black politicians who did not challenge the basic nature of political power in the city were “not examples of black power,” wrote Carmichael and Hamilton. “The power must be that of the community, and emanate from there.”84

Black power leaders felt that integrationist goals were

based on complete acceptance of the fact that in order to have a decent house or education, black people must move into a white neighborhood or send their children to a white school. This reinforces, among both black and white, the idea that “white” is automatically superior and “black” is by definition inferior. For this reason, “integration” is a subterfuge for the maintenance of white supremacy.... Such situations will not change until black people become equal in a way that means something, and integration ceases to be a one-way street.85

“Decent housing, fit for shelter of human beings,” for example, was a prominent element of the Black Panthers’ ten-point program for self-determination: “We believe that if the white landlords will not give decent housing to our black community, then the housing and the land should be made into cooperatives so that our community, with government aid, can build and make decent housing for its people.”86

Open Housing

The latter half of the 1960s also saw the emergence of advocacy strategies by the leading fair housing group, the NCDH, that would become very significant in subsequent years. The first was a challenge to the siting practices of government housing programs. The second was to draw attention to the land-use and zoning practices of local governments that had the effect of limiting housing for blacks. An important part of the NCDH strategy was to challenge the siting pattern of federally and locally subsidized housing. Open housing advocates felt that through assisted housing, government was complicit in the creation and maintenance of segregated black ghettos. The solution was to change the geography of subsidized housing. Although this effort had its greatest impact in the 1970s, it was initiated during the 1960s.

This concern about the siting of federally subsidized housing, debated within the black community for two decades, became the subject of fair housing action during this period. The NCDH and the NAACP filed a legal protest with state and federal officials in 1967 over a plan in Greenburgh, New York, just north of Yonkers, to use $8.7 million in urban renewal funds to build low-rent public housing for relocates in areas the plaintiffs argued would simply extend the ghetto.87 The organizations called on federal and state officials “to stop using public funds to entrench and extend segregation.”88 In Michigan, the state’s Civil Rights Commission also worked to guide the siting of public housing units so as to achieve more integration. The commission worked with local governments across the state and with HUD to adopt siting guidelines “that would contribute to the desegregation of homes and schools.”89

As the 1960s wore on, NCDH became more vocal about how, in its eyes, the federal government was contributing to racially segregated housing patterns. In 1965, NCDH sponsored a conference on “how to break up the ghetto,” and in 1967 it published a report on “how the federal government builds ghettos.” The report analyzed patterns of assisted housing placement and argued that the clustering of such units in black neighborhoods concentrated lower-income blacks in small geographic areas, reinforcing segregated residential patterns within metropolitan areas. The 1967 report called the U.S. government a “ghetto builder” for the way in which its programs were “undergirding a ghetto system” in the nation’s cities.90 The paper laid out seventeen specific charges against the government, focusing on its lack of will in pursuing desegregation.91 In 1968 NCDH also began another effort that highlighted local regulatory barriers to affordable housing that had the effect of limiting black occupancy in suburban areas.92 Those efforts were a continuation of the open housing movement’s focus on expanding housing opportunities for blacks beyond the walls of the ghetto.

Yet during the 1960s, and as a result of the influence of black power, the open housing movement began to consider the question of the importance of upgrading housing options within the black community. David Goldberg argues that in Detroit, for example, the open housing movement aimed certainly to open up exclusionary white suburban areas of Royal Oak, Dearborn, and Grosse Pointe, but was also concerned with eliminating discrimination within the city. In 1964 and 1965, the local offices of CORE and the NAACP helped create more than fifty tenants’ rights organizations to address the poor housing conditions faced by black residents of the city—as well as to build leadership among residents. Goldberg argues that this local activism was driven by the realization that the “legal and political struggles for open housing in the city’s outskirts or suburbs did little to address the realities and problems faced daily by poor and working class Blacks” in Detroit.93 In fact, Michael Danielson argues that blacks had been only moderately involved in the open housing movement and that some black leaders vehemently opposed it. City leaders, according to Danielson, harbored “doubts about any urban strategy that emphasizes suburbs.”94

By the end of the ’60s, the question of whether to work to improve ghetto areas was on the agenda within the housing rights movement as it had never been before. Movement historian Juliet Saltman notes that the NCDH newsletter, Trends, contained an average of thirty-seven references to integration each issue in 1956. By 1970, the average issue used the term only twice.95 In its place was a growing emphasis on revitalizing the ghetto and discussion of the merits of multiple strategies. The debate consumed the movement for several years. As Saltman recounts,

The Chicago national conference in 1971 revealed a deep concern with this issue, as indicated in the summary of the proceedings;... debate, which was never resolved, included the following points: 1. The desirability of dispersing the ghetto as opposed to extending equal opportunity in housing, 2. whether the focus should be on improving the quality of housing everywhere rather than anything else, 3. should the goals be a strengthening and rebuilding the ghetto as opposed to open housing, 4. to what degree do the goals, however defined, extend to groups other than negroes.96

Debates about revitalizing the ghetto were played out within the movement. The integrationists argued that the impacts of enrichment—at that point urban renewal and early War on Poverty programs—had been too limited. The NAACP and other open housing activists found the enrichment strategy “dangerously shortsighted.”97 Others within the movement were not so quick to dismiss enrichment. Open housing activists were more likely to conceptualize the debate as one between integration on the one hand and greater choice and access to housing on the other. While understanding the terms of this tradeoff, open housing advocates often found it difficult to make a choice. Saltman describes local open housing activism across the country and its ambivalence about this issue. She reports activists in Denver who worked “to provide every citizen of the metro area freedom of choice but in practice they encouraged everyone to make integrative moves.”98 In Los Angeles, she reported, “the immediate goal was to allow people out of the ghetto, but the long-term goal was related to freedom of choice,” while in Seattle activists prioritized desegregation and at the same time the director indicated that the intent was “first, last, and always, a free and meaningful choice in housing for everyone everywhere.” In these respects, then, open housing activists were attempting to pursue both objectives, and preferred to think of the two objectives as mostly complementary rather than conflicting. Still, there was awareness that this construction of events did not always hold. Activists in the Seattle open housing movement in 1969 “faced two alternatives: use existing staff to aggressively recruit and move middle class Negroes and minority families, thus accelerating the abandonment of the core city to the poor and powerless, or change our program strategy and direct it towards opening access to the existing supply of low and moderate priced housing while at the same time moving to increase the inadequate supplies in this category. We had little difficulty in opting for the second alternative.”99

In Akron, Ohio, the fair housing movement evolved away from integration and toward housing choice as the main objective.100

The Clash of Integration and Community Development

The early history of the open housing movement, as well as the early history of the broader civil rights movement in the United States, was characterized by a widespread commitment to integration. Integration was initially considered the chief objective of civil rights (and fair housing) activism and in all cases consistent with the effort to eliminate racial discrimination in housing. Almost from the outset of government efforts in the area of assisted housing for the poor, however, a debate arose within the black community about the relative importance of pursuing integration on the one hand and pursuing improvements in housing conditions within the black community on the other.

This debate magnified during the 1960s with the emergence of important voices within the black community that argued forcefully in favor of community development and against the privileging of integration within the civil rights movement. In part, the growing resistance to integration among some civil rights and black power activists was meant to address what some felt was a fundamental flaw in much of the integrationist agenda—the fact that most housing integration efforts produce tradeoffs for African Americans. These tradeoffs range from simply the disruption of having to move to a new (and integrated) neighborhood, to exposing themselves to the enmity of new neighbors when they made such moves. Furthermore, as Christopher Bonastia argues, these tradeoffs in the pursuit of housing integration are often more costly than the tradeoffs that are required to achieve employment or educational integration. Housing desegregation efforts, he writes, “are likely to subject African Americans to some form of hardship and hostility, [and] the direct sacrifice of more housing.”101 That is to say, the pursuit of housing integration typically imposed a burden.

The “enrichment/integration” debate also redefined the issues facing fair housing in another way. Up until this point there was no general distinction made between the objective of enhancing residential choice and achieving residential integration. The black power movement revealed, however, that these were in fact separable goals, that it was possible to pursue the expansion of housing choice for people of color without necessarily advocating for integration. The choice to remain within an ethnically or racially defined community was legitimized by the black power movement. If integration was not the only or the inevitable choice of people of color, then it followed that there was an important distinction between the goals of antidiscrimination and integration. It was clear in the wake of the black power challenge to traditional fair housing advocacy that greater choice, not integration, was the direct and inevitable outcome of antidiscrimination efforts.

Thus, nearing the end of the 1960s, the fair housing movement was faced with a divide that was actually three different questions, the first related to the desirability of enriching and developing black communities on the one hand or working to eliminate concentrations of people of color on the other, the second related to whether nondiscrimination or integration should be the primary goal of the movement, and the third being whether the achievement of greater choice in housing for minority groups should be the objective of the movement, or if facilitation of a particular choice (dispersal and integration) was to be the chief pursuit.

Passage of the Fair Housing Act in 1968 would mark a transition in this debate. Congressional action on the question of housing discrimination could have provided definitive answers to some, if not all, of the questions facing the fair housing movement. In fact, the Fair Housing Act and the circumstances of its enactment and subsequent implementation have not, in the main, provided clarity on these questions. It is to this issue that we turn next.