We cannot be satisfied as long as the Negro’s basic mobility is from a smaller ghetto to a larger one.
—Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., I Have a Dream1
This Article examines the 1968 Fair Housing Act from two perspectives. The first Part discusses the urban riots of the mid-1960s; the failure of the white press to examine the connection between the riots and systemic social problems, particularly segregation; and the Kerner Commission’s devastating indictment of mainstream media coverage of the riots, the Black ghetto, and African Americans. I argue the mainstream media’s poor coverage of the problems caused by inner-city ghettos made it more difficult to win popular and political support for the Fair Housing Act. The second Part examines the creation of a separate and unequal system of federally-subsidized housing in the two decades following enactment of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1968 Fair Housing Act. I argue erecting and maintaining a national system of taxpayer-assisted housing that blatantly violated federal fair housing laws, demonstrates the unwillingness of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and five presidential administrations to enforce the Fair Housing Act.
I. WATTS EXPLODES
On August 6, 1965, President Lyndon Johnson signed into law the Voting Rights Act,2 which eventually would lead to the enfranchisement of millions of African Americans. It was the high point of the Civil Rights Movement, its “Hallelujah, ’Tis Done” moment. Five days later, violence erupted in the largely Black community of Watts in Los Angeles after a white California Highway patrolman arrested Marquette Frye, a twenty-one-year-old Black man, for driving while intoxicated. The incident mushroomed into six days of rioting as thousands of African Americans took to the streets.3 It was the worst urban riot in twenty years, one fueled by deep-seated anger over segregated housing, poor schools, and few job opportunities.4
A. White Press Coverage
The Los Angeles Times said little about these problems in its coverage of the Watts riot. Instead, the newspaper treated the riot as a combination crime and disaster story. Its reporters relied almost exclusively on white police and white elected officials for information, particularly Mayor Sam Yorty and Police Chief William Parker. In one story, Chief Parker—the sole person quoted—blamed Black “so-called leaders” for “getting us into this trouble,” describing them as “modern-day Pied Pipers of Hamelin.”5 The headline on another story proclaimed Watts “totally devoid of leadership.”6 Mayor Yorty denounced allegations of police brutality as a “big lie” used by “Communists, dupes and demagogues irrespective of the facts.”7 Some reporters went further, portraying the overwhelmingly white Los Angeles Police Department as free from racial prejudice. After spending three hours with police at a command post in Watts, Philip Fradkin wrote, “No officer I talked to, overheard or questioned referred to the residents of the area as ‘niggers’ or made derogatory comments.”8
White reporters provided few quotes from the rioters and, as the violence intensified, it became increasingly dangerous for them to cover events inside the riot-torn area. The Los Angeles Times, then one of the largest newspapers in the country, needed Black journalists to get this perspective but did not have a single Black reporter in its newsroom.9 Robert Richardson, a twenty-four-year-old Black advertising messenger, volunteered to go into Watts and report what he saw using pay phones.10 A reporter at the paper’s downtown office took those unfiltered notes and refashioned them into sensational page-one stories with incendiary headlines like ‘Get Whitey,’ Scream Blood-Hungry Mobs and Burn, Baby, Burn.11 No one is named, every scene is horrific. “Then everybody started drinking—even little kids 8 or 9 years old,” one story said. “That’s when the cry started, ‘Let’s go where Whitey lives!’ That’s when I began to see guns.”12 Nothing in the story—or in subsequent investigations—showed marauding Black mobs were about to invade white neighborhoods.13
B. Black Press Coverage
There was a local news organization that did a superb job of covering the riots—the Los Angeles Sentinel. It detailed the death and destruction with firsthand accounts and official statements.14 It did not suggest marauding Black mobs were poised to invade white neighborhoods. Its reporters interviewed experts who detailed Watts’ poverty, inadequate schools, high unemployment, and substandard housing. The group included Municipal Court Judge Loren Miller, one of the lead attorneys in Shelley v. Kraemer,15 the landmark case in which the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled racially restrictive covenants unenforceable in court. Judge Miller told a commission investigating the riot that Watts was “a prototype of any ghetto in the nation” and warned that “until Los Angeles tackles its own ghetto problem, it will always be ripe for an accident like the one that triggered the riots in Watts.”16 The newspaper did not publish one-source stories in which Mayor Yorty and Chief Parker excoriated African Americans without any response. It did give voice to local and national civil rights leaders who took issue with Mayor Yorty’s myopic views and Chief Parker’s racist diatribes, including James Farmer, National Director of the Congress on Racial Equality and the organizer of the 1961 Freedom Rides.17 Speaking to a teachers’ convention, Farmer said Chief Parker’s statement during the riot that “[w]e are on the top and they are on the bottom” was disheartening but not surprising given that the veteran police chief once called the people of Watts “savages.”18 Mr. Farmer said national leaders must understand civil rights gains in the South had little impact on ghetto residents. “Recent legislative victories for the Negro have not affected the man in the street,” he said, “and a person in the ghetto area such as Watts can hardly care less about such legislative victories when he looks at the depressed conditions around him.”19 Because the Los Angeles Sentinel is a Black newspaper, its unparalleled coverage went unnoticed by the white press and the public at large.
C. The L.A. Times Blames Broken Families, Wins Pulitzer Prize
For its part, the Los Angeles Times paid scant attention to the systemic problems in south central Los Angeles, a community struggling to accommodate an almost tenfold increase in the county’s Black population between 1940 and 1965.20 Instead, its journalists rushed to judgment and attributed the riot to the fractured psyche and broken family structure of the residents of Watts. In a page-one story three days after the riot began, Washington, D.C. correspondent Thomas J. Foley—relying on Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s The Negro Family and quotes from President Johnson—attributed the unrest to the disintegration of the Black family.21 Two psychiatrists, neither of whom had talked to the rioters, told Los Angeles Times medical writer Harry Nelson that African Americans’ “strong feelings of rejection, self-hatred and anxiety about the future are the key psychological ingredients in Los Angeles’s race riots.”22 Thus, the white journalists at the Los Angeles Times said the Black residents of Watts took to the streets because they came from broken families and felt rejected. The newspaper’s coverage of the Watts riots so impressed the fourteen white men on that year’s Pulitzer Prize Board that they awarded the 1966 Pulitzer Prize for Local Reporting to the Los Angeles Times.23
Some congressional leaders in the nation’s capital challenged that narrative. Few were more passionate or eloquent than Senator Walter Mondale of Minnesota. Speaking on the floor of the Senate on the day order was finally restored in Watts, Senator Mondale said, “our deepest, most intransigent Negro problem is the slums of our great cities.”24 He added, “The Negro of Los Angeles could already vote. But what good is this if he is born in a broken home, crowded into a filthy slum, sent to an inferior school which is but a reflection of the unhappy community where he is forced to live?”25 Mondale understood better than most of his white colleagues that what happened in Watts might very well be repeated across the country because the Black urban ghetto could be found in virtually every big city. Indeed, scholars have shown that at the time, levels of Black residential segregation were higher than any group had ever experienced in the United States before or since.26 By fashioning an intricate network of laws, regulations, and practices, White America had erected an apartheid system of racially segregated housing. The Watts riot revealed the awful reality of ghetto life: low-income African Americans trapped in high-crime, poverty-stricken areas with poor schools and few jobs. The white power structure in Los Angeles failed to recognize this. The Los Angeles Times, the city’s most powerful news organization, failed to communicate this.27
D. The Nation’s Inner-Cities Explode
Los Angeles was no outlier. The inner-city violence—and the failure of the mainstream media to report on its structural causes—would be repeated in scores of American cities in the years immediately following the Watts riot.28 It would reach a crescendo during the first nine months of 1967 when more than 160 urban uprisings struck the nation.29 That summer, thirty-three cities experienced outbreaks of serious racial violence including Cincinnati, Milwaukee, Tampa, and Newark.30 One of the worst outbreaks took place in July in Detroit. Like many of the riots, it began as a response to heavy-handed actions by white police in a poor Black neighborhood. The toll was horrific. Forty-three persons killed and 324 injured. More than 7,200 persons arrested. An estimated $40 million in property damages ($300 million in today’s dollars).31 On July 27th—the same day thousands of National Guardsmen and U.S. Army troops restored order in Detroit—President Johnson told a national television audience that he would appoint a commission headed by Illinois Governor Otto Kerner to investigate the origins of the riots. Two days later, the President issued an Executive Order establishing the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders and charged it with answering three basic questions: “What happened? Why did it happen? What can be done to prevent it from happening again and again?”32
E. The Kerner Commission
Johnson was convinced the riots were the result of a Communist conspiracy.33 The Kerner Commission found otherwise. It said racial prejudice created the conditions that led to the riots. In its words, “White racism is essentially responsible for the explosive mixture which has been accumulating in our cities since the end of World War II.”34 The Kerner Commission said this mixture included pervasive discrimination and segregation in employment, education, and housing—particularly in the Black ghettos where, in its words, “segregation and poverty converge on the young to destroy opportunity and enforce failure.”35 President Johnson refused to accept the report; the American public had other ideas. In the first three days after its release on February 29, 1968, the Kerner Commission report sold an astonishing 300,000 copies. In the first two weeks, almost one million copies were sold.36
F. The White Press Failed Black Americans
One can only imagine the dismayed reaction of white journalists when they read the Kerner Commission report’s Chapter 15, The News Media and the Disorders. It represented nothing less than an indictment of mainstream media coverage of the riots, the ghetto, and African Americans. The Kerner Commission found white reporters relied almost exclusively on white officials for information on the riots and, in the process, grossly exaggerated the scale of destruction. The Commission said the central problem was their failure in reporting on race. In its words, “Our second and fundamental criticism is that the news media have failed to analyze and report adequately on racial problems in the United States and, as a related matter, to meet the Negro’s legitimate expectations in journalism.”37 The primary reason for this, according to the Commission, was the mainstream media’s refusal to understand the enduring struggle of Black Americans: “The media report and write from the standpoint of a white man’s world. The ills of the ghetto, the difficulties of life there, the Negro’s burning sense of grievance, are seldom conveyed.”38 White editors aggravated the problem by refusing to diversify their newsrooms. As the Commission put it, “The journalistic profession has been shockingly backward in seeking out, hiring, training and promoting Negroes.”39 For Senator Mondale, Senator Edward Brooke of Massachusetts, and others trying to shepherd the Fair Housing bill through Congress, the mainstream media had made their work infinitely harder. The wonder is that they succeeded.40
II. THE FAIR HOUSING ACT AND FEDERALLY-ASSISTED HOUSING
Federal housing programs must be given a new thrust aimed at overcoming the prevailing patterns of racial segregation. If this is not done, those programs will continue to concentrate the most impoverished and dependent segments of the population into the central-city ghettos where there is already a critical gap between the needs of the population and the public resources to deal with them.
—Kerner Commission, “Recommendations for National Action”41
On April 11, 1968, President Johnson signed into law the Fair Housing Act.42 The landmark legislation prohibited racial discrimination in the sale and rental of housing, and authorized the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to enforce the Act. Unlike the Voting Rights Act of 1965, progress in desegregating the nation’s apartheid system of housing has been uneven at best and non-existent in many metropolitan areas.43 Activists and scholars have vigorously debated whether HUD’s central problem has been inadequate enforcement powers or a lack of will.44 One way of addressing this question can be found by looking at the nation’s vast system of federally-assisted housing. HUD controls the funding for each federally-subsidized unit and thus exercises final authority. Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act prohibits discrimination in all federally-funded programs.45 That same year, HUD issued regulations prohibiting any action that would “[s]ubject a person to segregation or separate treatment in any matter related to his receipt of housing.”46 In the Fair Housing Act, Congress mandated HUD’s “duty to affirmatively further fair housing,” which includes “meaningful actions to be taken to overcome the legacy of segregation, unequal treatment, and historic lack of access to opportunity in housing.”47 How effective has HUD been in ensuring that African Americans have not been subjected to segregation and other forms of discrimination in taxpayer funded housing? Fifteen years after the Fair Housing Act became law, I began researching a story for the Dallas Morning News that sought to answer that question.
A. Judge Justice Integrates Public Housing in Clarksville, Texas
It began in the small East Texas town of Clarksville in December 1983. Clarksville had three public housing projects; two were all-Black, one all-white. The white men and women who ran the Clarksville Housing Authority (CHA) maintained racially segregated projects since the inception of the CHA in 1961.48 They said they were simply doing what both races wanted.49 However, it was not what Lucille Young, a Black mother with six children, wanted. It was not what Virginia Wyatt, a Black mother with five children, wanted. Ms. Young applied for public housing in Clarksville in 1975; Ms. Wyatt in 1978.50 Both had been repeatedly passed over because CHA officials would not allow African Americans to move into vacant apartments in the white project even if they were first on the waiting list.51 In 1980, Ms. Young and Ms. Wyatt sued the CHA and HUD. Their lawsuit, Young v. Pierce,52 asked U.S. District Court Judge William Wayne Justice to order Clarksville officials to stop segregating prospective tenants on the basis of race.53 In 1981, CHA officials signed a compliance agreement with HUD in which they vowed to stop assigning tenants on the basis of race and to act affirmatively to desegregate the projects. Two years later, Judge Justice found Clarksville’s housing projects were still rigidly segregated, while Ms. Young and her family were about to be evicted from a seriously dilapidated house with no hot water or gas utility service and a collapsed ceiling in one room.54 The judge ordered the housing authority to assign Ms. Young’s family a suitably-sized apartment and to devise an integration plan in which the racial make-up of each project would match the half-white, half-Black composition of CHA’s entire tenant population.55 On November 29, 1983, Judge Justice approved the housing authority’s plan, which called for twenty-five tenants in the all-white College Heights project to swap apartments with twenty-five tenants in the all-Black Cheatham-Dryden project.56
1. White Press Coverage
The order got the attention of white reporters from across the country. Many newspapers rushed to Clarksville and promptly portrayed the ruling as the worst form of social engineering. Newsday published a story with the headline Home-Swap Outrages Races.57 The Washington Post described the order as “[a]n apartment-swapping scheme.”58 Several stories focused on tenants who were forced to move from the white project, many of whom were elderly. As Judge Justice later recalled,
It was raining the day the moves began. It was a really bad day, just ideal fodder for the TV cameras to come up there and show the poor pitiful old people being moved from place to place, and listen to their plaintive cries about how much they didn’t want to move, didn’t want to live with blacks.59
Others featured Clarksville Mayor L.D. Williamson, who presented himself as a reasonable spokesman for the wisdom of maintaining segregation. “We don’t have any racial problems,” the mayor told one wire service reporter. “The whites are not mad at the blacks. The blacks are not mad at whites. They’re all mad at William Wayne Justice. If given the choice, none of them would have moved.”60 In a story headlined Desegregation Stirs Dismay in 2 Texas Housing Projects, Wayne King of the New York Times echoed Williamson’s view.61 King quoted two tenants forced to move, an outraged white (“I don’t know of a man in town who doesn’t think it’s the dirtiest thing that ever happened”) and a reluctant African American (“I didn’t want to move”).62 He did not quote Ms. Young, who was finally able to move her family into a public housing unit as a result of the ruling. The New York Times story said conditions in and around the white and Black projects were “similar.”63
What struck me as I read the national press accounts of what happened in Clarksville was how much they ignored. Their stories included little information about the history of the housing discrimination lawsuit or southern race relations. And I was astonished by the repeated assertion that conditions at the Black project were no different than at the white complex. As the Washington Post reported, “The two housing projects, built in 1965, are equal in size and appearance.”64 I found that hard to believe. I asked my editors if I could spend a few days in Clarksville, a community of 4,500 near the Texas-Oklahoma border, to see if what the national press reported was accurate. They agreed. I found that while College Heights and Cheatham-Dryden were within walking distance of one another, the two public housing projects could hardly have been more different. The tenants in College Heights lived in well-kept, ranch-style buildings with manicured lawns, sidewalks, and paved streets. Cheatham-Dryden was situated on a dirt road and surrounded by rutted, overgrown yards. Its tenants had to contend with cracked floors, decrepit kitchens, and unvented wall heaters. Rosemary Caviness, Executive Director of the CHA, said that conditions in Cheatham-Dryden threatened tenants’ health, and that a modernization campaign was needed to bring “the condition of that (black) project up to the white.”65 Clearly, Clarksville’s public housing projects were segregated and unequal. But was this an isolated example or part of a pattern? I asked my editors if I could visit other East Texas towns to answer that question. They agreed.66
B. Separate and Unequal Federally-Assisted Housing in East Texas
I visited thirteen East Texas cities and towns. In each one, I found the federally-subsidized housing was racially segregated and, without exception, the Black projects were inferior to the white developments in location, condition, amenities, and services. The disparity was less pronounced in small towns such as Gilmer and Cleveland, where white and Black families lived in older public housing projects. Many of the white men and women who oversaw smaller housing authorities told me racial segregation was needed to protect white folks from Blacks. As Irma Powers, the chain-smoking chairperson of the CHA Board of Commissioners, said of African Americans, “If I had a rent house, I wouldn’t want to rent to them. . . . They . . don’t have any morals, really, the biggest part of them don’t. They don’t.”67
The inequities were more dramatic in cities. In Texarkana and Port Arthur, “almost 600 black households—families and elderly alike—live[d] in four 30- to 40-year-old [public housing] projects,” each located in a predominantly Black neighborhood.68 African Americans occupied all of the units at three of these projects including Port Arthur’s Carver Terrace, which had refineries as neighbors on the north and west.69 Since 1974, local and federal housing officials built four federally-assisted developments in Port Arthur and Texarkana. Whites occupied 95 percent of the nearly 800 apartments in the four elderly-only complexes.70 Officials equipped each one with central air conditioning and heating, community centers, and sophisticated emergency alarm systems monitored by security guards. None of the Black-occupied projects enjoyed these amenities.71 Robert Mosely, an African American real estate broker and former Port Arthur City Council member, told me the disparities were not accidental. “It seems as if they are trying to revive segregation informally,” he said. “Why can’t that monitor (from HUD) see these things?”72 Documents and depositions obtained by Michael Daniel and Elizabeth Julian—the two civil rights attorneys who filed Young v. Pierce—showed HUD funded new developments in East Texas knowing full well that local officials segregated tenants and planned to continue doing so.73 In a 1980 deposition, Irving Statman—who served as “director of HUD’s Dallas-area office during the last three years of his 1971–1982 tenure there”—said he approved funding for public housing projects throughout East Texas, knowing many housing authorities would illegally segregate tenants by race.74 In an interview with the Dallas Morning News, Statman said he was hardly alone. In his words, “HUD contributed as much to creating segregated housing patterns as any institution in America, because we knew (HUD policies were contributing to racial segregation) and we went along with it.”75
This was not how the national press had portrayed what was happening in East Texas.76 Not surprisingly, my editors insisted I publish my findings. I pushed back. No one would be surprised, I said, if we published a story that said East Texas good old boys were segregating Black and white public housing tenants in blatant violation of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Or that the housing provided to African Americans was substandard. For years, the mainstream media had portrayed public housing as a failure epitomized by high-rise ghettos like Chicago’s Cabrini-Green and sprawling low-rise slums like the West Dallas project where thousands of poor Black families struggled to survive. I found scaled-down versions of these all-Black projects in Texarkana and Port Arthur and something else: four recently-constructed, elderly-only developments—one, the O.W. Collins Apartments, built with public housing dollars; the other three erected under the Section 8 New Construction program.77 Officials equipped each with the latest conveniences. Each was overwhelmingly white. The tenants told me they loved their apartments. “This is ideal for me,” said sixty-eight-year-old Irene Wright, who lived at the Collins Apartments for three years. “I’m going to stay here until they run me off.”78 Federally-subsidized housing in Port Arthur and Texarkana was separate and unequal—a stunning success story for white tenants, a failed promise for African Americans. This was new. What if, I asked my editors, this was true in San Francisco and Chicago, in Seattle and Atlanta, in Omaha and Los Angeles? They reluctantly agreed that would be a far more important story. They also gave me a terrific partner, George Rodrigue.
Over the next twelve months, Mr. Rodrigue and I examined federally-assisted housing in forty-seven cities and towns from the Northeast to the West Coast. We interviewed hundreds of tenants in subsidized housing; current and former officials with housing authorities, HUD, and the U.S. Department of Justice; and public and private housing experts. We also obtained thousands of documents from federal agencies and local governments through the federal Freedom of Information Act. We found almost ten million Americans lived in a system of federally-subsidized housing that was separate and unequal: whites in newer developments in mostly-white neighborhoods with relatively little crime; Blacks and other minorities in older public housing projects in high-crime, predominantly-minority areas.79 In most cities, federally-assisted housing was a throwback to the days of the Antebellum South: the deteriorating, barely habitable housing went to Blacks, while the newer and sometimes lavish housing went to whites.80 Astonishingly, whites occupied nearly two-thirds of the nation’s 3.7 million federally-subsidized rental units, almost ninety percent of which were provided after Congress approved the 1964 Civil Rights Act prohibiting racial discrimination in all federally funded programs.81 The explosion of federally-subsidized housing spawned a new pattern of segregation, disproportionately benefitting elderly whites and ignoring the needs of minority families. Consider Los Angeles, home to the largest housing authority west of the Mississippi.82
C. Separate and Unequal Federally-Assisted Housing in Los Angeles
I found that during the previous four decades, local officials erected forty-two federal rent-subsidy projects in which races were segregated and the buildings starkly unequal in condition, location, amenities, and services.83 The separate-and-unequal symmetry was remarkable. There were twenty-one family public housing projects and twenty-one elderly-only developments.84 African Americans and Hispanics, both families and the elderly, lived in over ninety-five percent of the apartments in the public housing projects.85 The elderly-only developments were mostly white. The family projects were built before 1955, and the elderly complexes came later.86 Most family projects were located in low-income, high-crime minority areas. Most elderly developments were in middle-class, mostly-white, and integrated neighborhoods with relatively little crime.87 I interviewed twenty-five tenants at five family complexes. Virtually all said fear pervaded their lives.88 Tenants at several elderly-only developments said they did not worry about street crime, including those at Angelus Plaza in downtown Los Angeles.89 With more than 1,000 apartments, Angelus Plaza was and is the nation’s largest federally-subsidized development for the elderly. Completed in 1980 under the Section 8 New Construction program at a cost of $150 million ($460 million in today’s dollars), it is also among the most expensive.90 Security measures include twenty-four-hour protection by guards, closed-circuit cameras, and a multi-story parking garage. In an emergency, a computerized system allows each resident to notify the building manager, who receives a printout with the tenant’s medical history, physician, and hospital.91 While Angelus Plaza residents praised these amenities along with the central air conditioning and wall-to-wall carpeting, they raved about the social services and recreational activities at the terraced, six-story community center next door.92 The 11,000-volume library. The ceramics studio with two kilns. The recreation area with pool and ping pong tables, large color television set, piano, jukebox, pinball machines, and a stereo-equipped stage. The medical clinic staffed by two physicians. The free psychological counseling. The free legal assistance. The interest-free loans. The dollar lunches and three-dollar dinners. The vans to take them shopping. Joe Rybacki summarized living in Angelus Plaza in three words: “just like heaven.”93
Like Angelus Plaza, the Nickerson Gardens public housing project in Watts has more than 1,000 units, but no one would confuse it with heaven. When I visited the project, there was no central air conditioning or wall-to-wall carpeting. No ceramics studio or library. No free psychological counseling, no free legal assistance, no interest-free loans. No guards or closed-circuit cameras, though street gangs like the Bounty Hunter Bloods openly sold crack cocaine, heroin, and PCP, terrorizing the African Americans who lived there including Willie Lewis and his wife Birdell.94 They were grateful their children were grown and no longer lived in Nickerson Gardens. “You’re in fear all the time,” said Mr. Lewis, a slender fifty-six-year-old with iron-gray hair and black-rimmed glasses.95 Security for the Lewises and the other 1,000 Black families and elderly individuals at Nickerson Gardens was a twelve-foot high, grease-coated fence erected by the housing authority.96 “‘You know why they put that fence up?’ said Lewis, gesturing at the black wrought-iron fence with menacing spikes that point inward. ‘They think we’re animals, so they’re fencing us in.’”97
D. Separate and Unequal Federally-Assisted Housing Nationally
In February 1985, the Dallas Morning News published Separate and Unequal: Subsidized Housing in America. The eight-part series showed that in the years following enactment of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and 1968 Fair Housing Act, HUD officials approved and funded a vast system of deeply segregated federally-subsidized housing in which conditions were more unequal than in previous decades.98 The responsibility for this extended beyond a single agency or president. The series found that five presidential administrations—Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, and Reagan—refused to use the strongest penalties provided under federal law to remedy racial discrimination in the nation’s subsidized housing.99 For example, the 1964 Civil Rights Act authorized HUD to cut off federal assistance to an agency or individual who engages in racial discrimination. Yet the series revealed no HUD secretary had ever used that authority despite evidence in federal lawsuits and HUD’s own records detailing rampant racial discrimination.100 Under the Housing and Community Development Act of 1974, HUD is empowered to refer violations of fair housing laws and the 1974 act to the Justice Department for prosecution. Yet the series reported federal housing officials had never asked the Justice Department to sue a locality for violating the 1974 act despite what the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights said were HUD’s own “well-documented findings of discrimination.”101 In a 1979 report that represented its most comprehensive examination of fair housing enforcement, the Commission concluded, “For more than a decade, the Departments of Housing and Urban Development and Justice, which have the primary roles in administering and enforcing Title VIII of the Civil Rights Act of 1968, have largely failed in their responsibilities to prevent and eliminate discrimination and segregation in housing.”102
1. HUD Turns a Blind Eye . . .
The Separate and Unequal series prompted outrage on Capitol Hill.103 Three Dallas congressmen asked the chairman of the House Subcommittee on Housing and Community Development to investigate the newspaper’s findings of pervasive racial discrimination in federally-subsidized housing.104 Representative Henry B. Gonzalez promptly agreed. In a letter to HUD Secretary Samuel R. Pierce, Jr., Congressman Gonzalez said he was shocked by the extent of “racial segregation in housing financed by the federal government.”105 The February 27, 1985 letter directed Secretary Pierce to address each finding and to “identify the steps the department plans to take in each of the major housing and community developments programs administered by the department to assure and improve compliance with the anti-discrimination requirements of the (1968) Civil Rights Act in general and the federally assisted housing and community development programs specifically.”106 Representative Gonzalez asked Secretary Pierce to provide a detailed response by April 15th.107 HUD finally submitted its report in late November, a few days before the hearings. HUD’s written response said the Dallas Morning News series “reports in a generally accurate manner the multi-faceted problems of segregation in subsidized housing.”108 In his testimony, HUD General Counsel John Knapp said deliberate segregation in public housing “undeniably exists in a great number of housing authorities,” and added that “[t]he persistence of that condition is an enforcement failure, and hardly explainable otherwise.”109 Massachusetts Representative Barney Frank noted HUD records showed the agency had denied or reduced Community Development Block Grant funds just four times over the past decade for fair housing violations. “That is an outrage, and that is why we have this problem,” Congressman Frank said. “Anybody who reads this says, ‘Hey, we can discriminate all we want, and there will be no administrative enforcement.’”110
2. . . . Judge Justice Does Not
A federal courtroom, particularly one presided over by Judge William Wayne Justice, is a different matter. On July 31, 1985, Judge Justice ruled federal and local housing officials in thirty-six East Texas counties violated the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution, Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and the Fair Housing Act, by intentionally segregating minorities and whites in federally-subsidized housing.111 In his words, “HUD’s intent to discriminate is established by the combination of HUD’s disingenuous assertions of ignorance, its actual knowledge of segregation, and its continuing financial support of each public housing site in the class counties.”112 Legal experts said the ruling was unprecedented. Previous findings of constitutional violations against HUD were limited to a single city and a single housing program. Judge Justice’s ruling covered 36 counties, 62 housing authorities, and 219 projects funded under three rent-subsidy programs.113 The scope of the ruling raised an obvious question: what sort of remedy would the judge fashion? Eighteen months earlier, Judge Justice ordered white and Black public housing tenants to swap apartments in Clarksville, prompting several mainstream reporters to suggest he might order thousands of subsidized housing tenants in East Texas to do the same. Wayne King of the New York Times wrote, “The [Clarksville] order could set a precedent for 10,000 other public housing units in 36 Texas counties.”114
Such rank speculation proved unfounded. As the judge’s biographer Frank Kemerer observed, “It was clear from the [final] order that forced integration as a remedy had retreated.”115 In July 1986, Judge Justice appointed Francis E. McGovern, a law professor at the University of Alabama, to serve as special master—the first time this happened in a federal housing desegregation case.116 Over the next eighteen years, the judge and the special master sought to implement a deeply ambitious remedial plan: the equalization of housing conditions, including equipping the Black projects with air conditioning; desegregation of the white and Black projects; funding and the use of the public housing and Section 8 programs to provide more than 5,000 desegregated housing opportunities in predominantly white areas; injunctions against cities seeking to block the development of public housing in predominantly white neighborhoods; and equalization of neighborhood conditions around the predominantly Black projects, including the allocation of $13 million in state funding for improvements.117 Many of the accomplishments were achieved despite HUD’s obstructionist tactics. According to Mr. Daniel and Ms. Beshara, “Most of the relief was obtained only after the record of HUD’s violations of previous remedial orders was compiled and presented to the Court.”118
E. Separate and Unequal Federally-Assisted Housing in Dallas
Following publication of the Separate and Unequal series, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights—created by Congress in 1957 to monitor federal efforts to enforce civil rights laws—held two days of hearings. What they heard from HUD General Counsel Knapp and William Bradford Reynolds, head of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, could hardly have been more dispiriting. Mr. Knapp and Mr. Reynolds told panel members that the federal government cannot adequately enforce fair housing laws. Instead, they said the federal government must rely on private lawsuits and investigations to desegregate the nation’s cities.119 Events in Dallas would disprove the former and substantiate the latter. A few months before the hearings, Debra Walker and six other poor Black women sued HUD and the Dallas Housing Authority. The class action suit, Walker v. HUD,120 said federal and local officials had created a separate and unequal system of federally-subsidized housing in Dallas, forcing thousands of poor African American families to live in taxpayer-supported slums—epitomized by the 3,500-unit West Dallas public housing project.121 In 1987, the parties agreed to a settlement. The housing authority would renovate 832 apartments at the West Dallas project. The rest were to be demolished and replaced with Section 8 certificates that poor families could use to rent apartments in Dallas and several suburbs.122 That is until HUD Secretary Jack Kemp blew up the consent decree.
Before a packed news conference at the Loews Anatole Hotel in Dallas, Secretary Kemp said he committed $65 million for the largest public housing redevelopment effort in the country: the renovation or construction of an additional 1,200 units at the West Dallas project.123 “Like Nehemiah, I want to be a builder,” said Kemp, comparing himself to the biblical prophet who rebuilt the walls of Jerusalem. He said the plan represented a “new day in public housing,” one that would revitalize one of the city’s poorest and most violent neighborhoods.124 I covered Kemp’s press conference. His announcement stunned me. Three-quarters of the units at the West Dallas project were vacant. U.S. District Court Judge Jerry Buchmeyer, who was presiding over Walker v. HUD, said the sprawling project—built ostensibly as a “solution” to the “Negro Housing Problem”—was in fact “a gigantic monument to segregation and neglect.”125 If Kemp made good on his plan, the rebuilt project would house 2,000 African American families in the city’s poorest neighborhood—and its most polluted.126 An abandoned lead smelter next door had saturated the soil in the project with lead particles for decades.127 Implementation of the Kemp plan also would eliminate 1,200 Section 8 certificates African American families could use to rent apartments of their choosing.128 I began interviewing housing experts. They were appalled. “This is tragedy in the making,” said Dr. Gary Orfield, one of the country’s leading authorities on segregation and its social effects. “It is totally predictable that it will produce social isolation, inferior education and serve as a breeding ground for gangs.” He added, “The idea that it will redevelop the neighborhood is truly crackpot. . . . This is just madness.”129 Dr. Douglas S. Massey and Dr. Nancy A. Denton were then researching what would become their classic work, American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass. When I asked Dr. Massey his opinion of the Kemp plan, he said: “It freezes the ghetto in concrete.”130
Secretary Kemp had some prominent supporters. Dallas Mayor Steve Bartlett said HUD’s plan “will lead to good housing, to a safe environment (and) to freedom of choice.”131 Attorneys for the Justice Department “told Judge Buchmeyer in court papers that the plan would eliminate all vestiges of segregation in West Dallas.”132 HUD also had an expert witness, Kurt Wehbring in Portland, Oregon. In a memorandum to Wehbring, HUD attorneys said they wanted “court approval of our plan to retain 2,000 units.” To do this, the memo said, “we wish to have our arguments supported by expert testimony.”133 Five months later, Wehbring’s firm, Sextant Consultants Inc., presented its conclusion: West Dallas should have 2,000 units of public housing. HUD paid Sextant $330,000.134 Wehbring did not ask West Dallas residents what they wanted. Nor did he ask anyone on the public housing waiting list. Dr. Richard Scotch, a sociology professor at the University of Texas at Dallas, did. He asked 261 families on the waiting list whether they wanted a Section 8 certificate or an apartment in a renovated West Dallas project. Eighty percent rejected the project.135 The attorneys for the plaintiffs—Ms. Julian, Mr. Daniel, and Ms. Beshara—hired Dr. Scotch. They paid him $2,600.136 In an interview, Dr. Scotch said he was puzzled by HUD’s failure to ask the opinion of those most affected by the redevelopment project: “If they really wanted to know what people wanted . . . they would have asked them.”137
1. Judge Buchmeyer Orders HUD to Replace the Ghettos it Built in Dallas
The Dallas Morning News reported these and other findings in a series of stories in May 1993. Later that year, Henry Cisneros, who replaced Kemp as the head of HUD, scrapped his predecessor’s plan for a 2,000-unit West Dallas project. Instead, Secretary Cisneros proposed a 1,600-unit West Dallas project.138 The plan dismayed attorneys for the plaintiffs. As they wrote, “The absurdity of the proposal was highlighted by a series in the Dallas Morning News on the proposal. West Dallas at the time was an EPA Superfund site for lead pollution from a lead smelter that still adjoined the proposed site for the 1,600 units.”139 In 1994 and 1996, Judge Buchmeyer ruled that HUD purposefully violated the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution, Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and the Fair Housing Act.140 “HUD does have the Title VIII obligation to replace the ghettos of Dallas’ publicly assisted housing with truly integrated and balanced living patterns free from segregation and inequality,” Judge Buchmeyer wrote.141 However, the judge said that “based on the uncontested facts, HUD and its federal predecessors knowingly and willingly perpetuated and maintained racial segregation in DHA’s low-income housing programs.”142 Like Judge Justice, Judge Buchmeyer appointed a special master who would oversee new remedial orders issued in the case.143 The results were nothing short of astonishing: approximately 9,900 new assisted units for poor minority families and the elderly; approximately $22 million for the creation of housing opportunities in predominantly white areas of Dallas and its suburbs; HOPE VI funding for 950 units in the West Dallas project—the number set by the consent decree; $94 million from Dallas for neighborhood equalization and economic development in the Black public housing project neighborhoods; HUD agreed to provide approximately $10 million for mobility counseling; and Dallas agreed to provide $2 million for the operation of a fair housing organization focused on the problems of low-income minority families.144 According to an Urban Institute study published in 2000, “Walker is the largest desegregation settlement against a housing authority in the United States.”145 Taken together, Young v. Pierce and Walker v. HUD represent civil rights litigation and judicial decision-making of the highest order matched in magnitude only by the federal government’s willful abdication of its statutory and regulatory responsibilities to enforce the nation’s fair housing laws.146
F. Robert Weaver on Title VIII: “There Wasn’t the Will to Enforce It”
In East Texas, in Los Angeles, in Dallas, in cities and towns across the country, HUD failed to ensure African Americans were not subjected to segregation and other forms of discrimination in taxpayer-funded housing. Indeed, the federal housing agency and several presidential administrations erected and continue to maintain a separate and unequal system of federally-subsidized housing in blatant violation of Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1968 Fair Housing Act. Why have these officials not used their statutory and regulatory powers to enforce the nation’s fair housing laws? While researching the Separate and Unequal series, I put that question to Robert Weaver, whose career in civil rights and housing then spanned fifty years. Mr. Weaver, the first secretary of HUD and the first African American to serve in a Cabinet-level position, said the Fair Housing Act provided the federal government with the tools to dismantle the ghettos that trapped millions of African Americans. “But those tools were never seriously enforced,” he said. “The reason that it wasn’t enforced to the degree that it could be enforced was because there wasn’t the will to enforce it.”147
