The Color of Law A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America by Richard Rothstein (z-lib.org).epub

The floor leader for the Fair Housing Act in the Senate was
Walter Mondale, a senator from Minnesota who later served as vice
president under Jimmy Carter and was the Democratic nominee for
president in 1984. In 1968, as they had done successfully in 1966,
southern Democrats engaged in a filibuster against the bill. Senator
Mondale was one vote short of the sixty-seven needed to end
debate (to invoke “cloture”). The vice president at the time was
Hubert Humphrey, serving under Lyndon Johnson. Recently,
Mondale recalled how he got the Fair Housing Act passed in the
Senate. “So I went to Humphrey, and I said, ‘What do I do?’ He
said ‘call Lyndon Johnson,’ so I called the president (which you
don’t do every day), and I told him our predicament. He said,
‘Well, do you know of any vote that could be cast for this where
the person wouldn’t be hurt, where they would not have any
trouble politically?’ And I said, ‘Well, the senator from Alaska
could do it, but he’s against cloture. But he also wants a housing
project in downtown Anchorage,’ and the president said ‘Thank
you’ and hung up. So the next morning we’re on the floor: ‘Will
we get cloture?’—most people didn’t think we would do it—and
just as the vote tally was ending I saw the senator from Alaska
come through the back door and vote ‘aye’ and we passed fair
housing, we got the cloture on the fourth vote, no votes to spare but
we got it! Then the bill went to the House.”
Enforcement of the Fair Housing Act has been weak, but neither
has it been absent. Middle-class African Americans are now
minimally present in many predominantly white suburbs.
(Levittown is now 1 percent African American.) Under the 1968
act, individuals who had suffered from housing discrimination
could file complaints with the Department of Housing and Urban
Development (HUD), but the department could attempt only to
“conciliate” the parties; it had no enforcement powers.
Complainants could file private lawsuits with punitive damages
capped at $1,000. The Department of Justice could file civil suits
against systematic perpetrators of discrimination but not on behalf
of single individuals. The Fair Housing Act was amended in 1988
to establish a system of HUD administrative law judges to resolve
presumptively valid complaints that came from state and local fair
housing agencies, but HUD’s enforcement activities have been
focused more on discrimination based on family status and
disability than on race. Audit studies (where matched pairs of
African American and white testers pose as potential buyers or