On a cool spring day in April 1968, President Lyndon Johnson walked into the White House’s East Room, where he was greeted with what the Associated Press described as “loud, enthusiastic, and sustained” applause from civil rights leaders and politicos alike. It had been a week since James Earl Ray killed Martin Luther King Jr. with a single shot, triggering a wave of civil unrest some called the Holy Week Uprisings. A day after the murder, Johnson had sent a letter to Congress urging them to expedite a bill that would outlaw housing discrimination based on “the color of his [a man’s] skin.” Then, six days later, he was in the House Chamber to sign the Civil Rights Act of 1968, which included Title VIII, the Fair Housing Act. “Now the Negro families no longer suffer the humiliation of being turned away because of their race,” he said.
But saying so did not make it so. While blatant discrimination faded in some areas of Black American life, the real estate market was not transformed with the stroke of LBJ’s pen. Even now, after more than half a century has elapsed, statistics show persistent inequality in the housing sector. In 1960, eight years before passage of the Fair Housing Act, 65 percent of white Americans owned their homes, compared to 38 percent of Black Americans. Last year, 74.6 percent of whites owned their homes while only 45.3 percent of Blacks did. Over the last sixty-two years, not only has the racial gap remained, it has grown from a 27-point gap to a more than 29-point gap today.
Washington, D.C. itself is a case study in failed aspirations, and not just because of legislation that didn’t deliver on a promise. A city with a rich history of Black migration and a growing Black middle class has remained segregated, almost as if it were two: one city serving as a bastion of opportunity for the educated elite, the other as a once-imagined cultural utopia in decay. In the wider metropolitan area, the disparity is especially pronounced, as is the case with most urban-suburban comparisons. The Center for Economic Studies reported last year that, based on 2020 census data, the level of segregation in the greater Washington area (often called DMV, for District, Maryland, and Virginia) ranked as “very high.” On an index that measures Black-white segregation among fifty metro areas in the United States with the largest Black populations, D.C. was thirteenth highest. Census data also shows that white homeownership in the D.C. metro region is around 50 percent, while it’s just shy of 26 percent for Blacks.
