At the Santa Monica City Attorney’s Office, we have three particular black-and-white photographs from the civil rights era. We present them at the start of our April fair housing symposium to show why April is National Fair Housing Month and the gravity of its origins. They are now part of a slide show but fifteen years ago we had them enlarged and mounted on posterboard.
In the first photograph, President Lyndon Baines Johnson, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Whitney Young are huddled in the Oval Office in 1964 for a strategy session over the first civil rights bill. It’s the beginning of President Johnson and Dr. King’s fruitful if sometimes bumpy relationship. Their collaborations would soon result in landmark legislation with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
By early April of 1968, however, President Lyndon Baines Johnson and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. were keenly apprehensive for the prospects of a third civil rights bill that they had been working on together since 1966. After addressing discrimination in schools, the polling booth, and public accommodations, the two men had focused legislative efforts on eradicating racial segregation and housing discrimination. Their hopes were with a fair housing bill that made it illegal to treat applicants for rental housing, tenants, home-buyers, and borrowers differently because of their race, religion, color, or national origin.
However, the bill’s two year journey had seemingly come to an unfulfilled end in the Capitol. As of April 4, 1968, it was stuck fast in a legislative committee chaired by a staunch segregationist who had no intention to ever report the bill out.
To show how that happened, our second photograph takes us deeper into the bill’s history. It shows Johnson and King back in April of 1966 in the Cabinet Room for the first top-level meeting over what protections should be in a law for fair housing (also known back then as “open housing”) and how to get it passed. They anticipated a long fight against segregationists and states’ rights advocates.
At that meeting was Congress’s godfather of civil rights legislation, New York Congressman Emanuel Celler. Celler eventually introduced a comprehensive fair housing bill (H.R.2516) in January of 1967, and the already protracted effort began in earnest. By March of 1968, the bill’s supporters had seen it bottled up with a year of neglect in the House and then blocked with constant filibusters in the Senate.
But just when the H.R. 2516 seemed dead in the water, it would get a breath of life from either the President himself or a hard-hitting civil rights report. Johnson wrote at least two letters to Congress to get the bill moving and demanded in official remarks that the leaders stop “fiddling and piddling” with fair housing. During one attempt in 1967 to end a filibuster, President Johnson even offered to send an Air Force One jet to pick up three or four absent supporters of fair housing and bring them to D.C. to vote.
A jet ride did not grab the Senate’s attention the same way as the Kerner Commission’s Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders and its grim picture of race and inequality in America. Senator Fred Harris from Oklahoma had recommended the commission to President Johnson. Fifty years later, in April of 2018, Senator Harris himself would tell the audience at Santa Monica’s fair housing symposium that the president appointed him to the commission with the warning to remember who was boss. But Senator Harris and the commission’s other members believed it was the people rather than a president that they served.
The March 1, 1968 report concluded that the country was “moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal” and that racial segregation had to be addressed with a comprehensive federal fair housing law. Much more hard-hitting than President Johnson had wanted, the Kerner report’s impact spurred the Senate to vote cloture on the filibuster. After a 71-20 vote on March 11, 1968, the bill had finally escaped the Senate.
The bill returned to the House of Representatives for the House’s concurrence with several Senate amendments. A hopeful consent request was rejected and then the bill was dealt another blow—a referral to the Rules Committee. The Rules Committee was chaired by Mississippi’s William Colmer, a staunch segregationist, and the only quick thing he did with the bill was to immediately defer any consideration of it. The definitive law review article on H.R. 2516’s legislative history by Jean Dubofsky states that after a second continuance by Colmer delaying action until mid-April, “fears had increased that the Senate’s civil rights bill might die in the Rules Committee.”
Upon relating this piece of civil rights history to our Santa Monica symposium audience, we unveil the third photograph, that of President Johnson signing the Civil Rights Acts of 1968 (“Fair Housing Act”) on April 11, 1968. The President is surrounded by some twenty men, including Celler, Senator Walter Mondale, the bill’s co-sponsor, and future Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall.
Success at last! But April 11?! How was it possible for a bill languishing in the Rules Committee on April 4 to suddenly escape that committee and its pro-segregation chairperson, and then get itself and its Senate amendments debated and passed by the House to reach the President’s desk within seven days.
The answer is in—or with what’s not in—the photograph from the signing ceremony. King is not in it. Nor would he be in another iconic shot of him shaking hands with and accepting a signing pen from President Johnson. King had been assassinated on April 4thand a shocked nation wanted to do something with its grief. King’s death and his April 9 memorial service broke the fair housing bill free. In homage to Dr. King’s great commitment and work, in response to the civil unrest, in remorse, and also to just finally do the right thing, the House quickly insisted on action from its own Rules Committee.
Resistant to the end, Chairman Colmer decried the idea of holding a vote during such a tumultuous week and even tried to force through a Joint House-Senate committee to build in more delay. However, one of his key allies switched their vote and the bill passed out of the committee on April 9. The House scheduled its debate on vote on the Senate amendments for the very next day. On April 10, after the House decided to keep debate to just one hour, the bill sprinted through a 250-172 vote and straight to a relieved President.
“Long and stormy” is how President Johnson described the Fair Housing Act’s trip, and its passage came with thunder, lightning, and tragedy. So we celebrate National Fair Housing Month in April in recognition of its April 11, 1968 passage into law, but we also celebrate this achievement of fair housing rights in April because, as Johnson put it in his April 5, 1968 letter to Congress, “a man who devoted his life to the nonviolent achievement of rights that most Americans take for granted was killed by an assassin’s bullet.”
To see and hear more of this history and also the future of fair housing, please join us for the morning of Tuesday, April 18, 2023 at the Martin Luther King Jr. Auditorium in Santa Monica’s main library, from 9 a.m. to noon. The event is free to the public, and parking will be validated. Space is limited so pleaseregistersoon athttps://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSesFQC1wGoIQgRXPxviHkb50PdJDmsTklih7_Zj8FbNheRNsw/viewform.
Gary Rhoades is a Deputy City Attorney in the Consumer Protection Unit of the Santa Monica City Attorney’s office, which enforces the fair housing laws in Santa Monica and promotes public awareness of fair housing. The City’s Fair Housing Month activities this April include a fair housing poster contest for Santa Monica students, a public awareness ad campaign, and a free symposium on April 18. Please direct any questions to consumer.mailbox@santamonica.gov.
By Gary Rhoades