Civil Rights Act of 1968

Based on Wikipedia: Civil Rights Act of 1968

The Law That Came Too Late for the Man Who Made It Possible

On April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated on a motel balcony in Memphis. Six days later, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1968 into law—a bill that had been stalled, filibustered, and left for dead in Congress for years. The man whose movement made fair housing legislation possible would never see its passage.

This is one of the most consequential pieces of legislation in American history, yet its story reveals an uncomfortable truth about how change actually happens in America: sometimes it takes tragedy to overcome political inertia.

What the Law Actually Does

The Civil Rights Act of 1968 is really several laws bundled together, each addressing different aspects of American life. The most famous section, known as the Fair Housing Act, made it illegal to discriminate in the sale, rental, or financing of housing based on race, religion, or national origin. Later amendments added protections for sex, disability, and families with children.

But here's something most people don't realize: housing discrimination had technically been illegal for over a century before this law passed. The Civil Rights Act of 1866—passed just after the Civil War—prohibited discrimination in housing. The problem? It had no enforcement mechanism. You could theoretically sue someone who discriminated against you, but there were no federal agencies investigating violations, no penalties built into the law, no real consequences.

The 1968 act changed that. It created actual teeth for fair housing enforcement. It also did something quite powerful: it made housing discrimination a federal crime. Anyone who uses force or threats to intimidate someone because of their race, color, religion, or national origin in a housing context can face serious criminal penalties—up to life in prison if the crime involves kidnapping, sexual assault, or murder.

The Indian Civil Rights Act: A Story Within the Story

Buried in the same legislation is another landmark law that rarely gets discussed: the Indian Civil Rights Act. Titles II through VII of the 1968 act applied most of the protections in the Bill of Rights to Native American tribal governments.

This requires some explanation. The Bill of Rights—those first ten amendments to the Constitution guaranteeing things like freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and protection against unreasonable searches—originally applied only to the federal government. Over time, most of these protections were extended to state governments through a legal doctrine called "incorporation." But tribal governments occupied a unique legal space. They were considered sovereign nations, not bound by the Constitution in the same way as federal or state governments.

The Indian Civil Rights Act changed this. It meant that if you were a Native American living under tribal jurisdiction, you now had constitutional-style protections against your tribal government. It was a significant expansion of civil rights, though one that continues to generate debate about tribal sovereignty to this day.

The Anti-Riot Act: The Controversial Rider

The 1968 act also included something that seems almost contradictory to its civil rights mission: the Anti-Riot Act. This provision made it a federal felony to travel across state lines with the intent to incite, promote, or participate in a riot.

This section of the law earned the informal nickname "the H. Rap Brown Law." H. Rap Brown was a prominent civil rights activist who had been arrested in 1967 for carrying a gun across state lines. Critics argued—and continue to argue—that the Anti-Riot Act was designed to criminalize organized political protest by equating it with organized violence.

The constitutional problems with this provision eventually caught up with it. In 2020 and 2021, federal appeals courts struck down portions of the law that prohibited "urging" a riot, finding that such language violated the First Amendment's protection of free speech. The bans on actually inciting or participating in riots remain in place.

Why Fair Housing Was the Hardest Fight

Senator Walter Mondale, who championed the Fair Housing Act in Congress, made a revealing observation about why this particular law faced such fierce opposition. Previous civil rights legislation—the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965—had focused largely on dismantling legal segregation in the South. Northern politicians could support those laws while feeling morally superior to their Southern colleagues.

Fair housing was different. As Mondale put it:

"A lot of [previous] civil rights [legislation] was about making the South behave and taking the teeth from George Wallace…. This came right to the neighborhoods across the country. This was civil rights getting personal."

When you tell a homeowner in Boston or Chicago or Los Angeles that they cannot refuse to sell their house to a Black family, suddenly civil rights legislation isn't just about correcting Southern injustice. It's about changing practices in your own backyard. And that, as it turned out, was a much harder sell.

The fair housing provision was so controversial that it killed an entire civil rights bill in 1966. According to Mondale, federal fair housing legislation was the most filibustered legislation in United States history. It was opposed not just by Southern segregationists, but by Northern senators and the National Association of Real Estate Boards—the forerunner to today's National Association of Realtors.

What Changed? Two Catalysts

Two events finally broke the logjam.

The first was the Kerner Commission report. After devastating race riots swept through American cities in 1967—Detroit, Newark, and dozens of other communities saw violence that left scores dead and caused hundreds of millions of dollars in damage—President Johnson appointed a commission to investigate the causes. The commission's report, released in early 1968, concluded that America was "moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal." Among its recommendations: "a comprehensive and enforceable federal open housing law."

Members of Congress began citing the Kerner Report in their arguments for the Fair Housing Act. But the bill was still stalled.

Then came April 4, 1968.

King's assassination sparked civil unrest across the country. Cities burned. The National Guard was deployed. And suddenly, the political calculus shifted. The day after King's death, President Johnson wrote a letter to the House of Representatives urging immediate passage of the Fair Housing Act. The House Rules Committee, which had been holding hearings that seemed designed to delay the bill indefinitely, was "jolted by the repeated civil disturbances virtually outside its door." The committee ended its hearings on April 8. Two days later, the bill passed the House by a wide margin.

There's something deeply uncomfortable about this timeline. The greatest champion of nonviolent resistance had to be murdered before Congress would pass legislation he had advocated for years. The rioting that followed his death—riots he would have opposed—created the political pressure that finally moved the bill forward.

The Chicago Campaign That Paved the Way

King had made housing discrimination a central focus of his activism in the final years of his life. In 1966, he led the Chicago Open Housing Movement alongside James Bevel and Al Raby. The campaign targeted the endemic housing segregation in Northern cities, demonstrating that Jim Crow wasn't just a Southern phenomenon—it was woven into the fabric of American real estate practices nationwide.

King and his supporters marched through white neighborhoods in Chicago, demanding an end to discriminatory housing practices. They were met with violent resistance. White residents threw rocks and bottles. Someone hit King in the head with a rock. He later said that he had "never seen—even in Mississippi and Alabama—mobs as hostile and as hate-filled as I've seen in Chicago."

The Chicago campaign didn't achieve immediate legislative victory, but it shifted the national conversation about housing discrimination. It made clear that this wasn't just about old Southern prejudices—it was about the way American cities were organized, the way wealth was distributed, the way neighborhoods were built.

How Fair Housing Works in Practice

The Fair Housing Act prohibits several specific forms of discrimination. You cannot refuse to sell or rent to someone because of their race, color, religion, national origin, sex, disability, or family status. You cannot advertise a property in ways that indicate discriminatory preferences. You cannot use different terms or conditions for different tenants based on protected characteristics. You cannot neglect maintenance or restrict access to amenities based on who the tenants are.

But here's an important nuance: landlords can still be selective about tenants. They can reject applicants with poor credit histories or inadequate income. They can require references and background checks. What they cannot do is apply these criteria differently based on protected characteristics. A landlord who requires excellent credit from Black applicants but accepts mediocre credit from white applicants is violating fair housing law, even though credit screening itself is perfectly legal.

The law also contains an interesting asymmetry. Sellers and landlords cannot discriminate, but buyers and renters can. If you're looking for a home and you tell your real estate agent you only want to live in certain neighborhoods, that's legal—even if your reasons are discriminatory. The Fair Housing Act protects your right to choose where you want to live. What it prohibits is other people limiting your choices through discrimination.

Disability Protections: The Reasonable Accommodation Standard

The Fair Housing Act defines disability the same way as the Americans with Disabilities Act: a physical or mental impairment that substantially limits one or more major life activities. This includes people who have a record of such impairment or who are regarded as having one.

Two specific protections deserve attention.

First, tenants with disabilities have the right to make "reasonable modifications" to their rental units at their own expense. If you need grab bars in the bathroom to safely shower, the landlord must allow you to install them. If you need a ramp to access your front door, you can build one. The landlord cannot refuse these modifications just because they change the property.

There's an interesting wrinkle here. Technically, a landlord can require you to remove certain modifications when you move out and restore the property to its original condition. But the regulations recognize that some modifications actually improve a unit's usability for future tenants. Widening a doorway to accommodate a wheelchair, for example, doesn't interfere with the next tenant's enjoyment of the property—it arguably makes the unit more accessible for everyone. So landlords can't require you to narrow the doorway again when you leave.

Second, landlords must make "reasonable accommodations" to their rules and policies for tenants with disabilities. The classic example involves service animals. A building with a "no pets" policy cannot refuse to let a blind tenant keep their seeing-eye dog. The dog isn't a pet in the traditional sense—it's an accommodation that allows the tenant to live independently. Similarly, a wheelchair user might request an assigned accessible parking space in a lot that normally operates on a first-come, first-served basis. That's a reasonable accommodation.

The key word in both cases is "reasonable." The law doesn't require accommodations that would impose undue hardship on landlords or fundamentally alter the nature of the housing. But it does require genuine effort to make housing accessible to people with disabilities.

The Evolution of Protected Classes

The original 1968 act protected against discrimination based on race, color, religion, and national origin. The law has expanded significantly since then.

In 1974, Congress added sex discrimination to the list of prohibited practices. This protected women from discriminatory rental practices and predatory behavior by landlords.

In 1988, the law was amended again to include people with disabilities and families with children. The family status protection is broader than many people realize—it covers pregnant women, since they have "familial status" with their unborn child.

Sexual orientation and gender identity were not included in the original law or its amendments. For decades, LGBTQ Americans had no federal housing discrimination protections. This began to change in 2012, when the Department of Housing and Urban Development issued regulations prohibiting discrimination in federally assisted housing programs.

The bigger shift came in 2020, when the Supreme Court ruled in Bostock v. Clayton County that discrimination based on "sex" necessarily includes discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity. Although that case involved employment law, its logic applies to any statute that prohibits sex discrimination. In February 2021, the Biden administration's Housing and Urban Development Department formally implemented this ruling for fair housing purposes.

The Covenant Problem

Before the Fair Housing Act, one of the most insidious tools of housing discrimination was the restrictive covenant—a clause written into property deeds that prohibited the sale of homes to certain groups. These covenants were often explicitly racist: "This property shall not be sold, leased, or rented to any person not of the Caucasian race."

Antisemitic covenants were common too: "No persons of the Hebrew race" could purchase property in certain developments.

The Supreme Court had ruled in 1948, in Shelley v. Kraemer, that courts could not enforce racially restrictive covenants. But the covenants themselves remained on the books, and they continued to have a chilling effect on housing integration. Many Black and Jewish families were unaware that the covenants were unenforceable, or faced social pressure even without legal enforcement.

The Fair Housing Act made these covenants definitively illegal. Because the law prohibited discrimination based on race, nationality, and religion, it swept away the entire edifice of restrictive covenants that had shaped American neighborhoods for generations.

This is one reason the 1968 act received strong support from Jewish organizations. They understood that antisemitic housing discrimination and anti-Black housing discrimination were two heads of the same hydra. Killing one required killing the other.

Enforcement and Penalties

The act created a framework for federal enforcement that the 1866 law had lacked. The Office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity within the Department of Housing and Urban Development is charged with investigating complaints and enforcing the law.

Penalties can be severe. Violating fair housing law can result in fines and up to a year in prison. If the violation involves bodily injury, firearms, explosives, or fire, the prison term can extend to ten years. Crimes involving kidnapping, sexual assault, or murder can be punished by life imprisonment or even the death penalty.

Victims of housing discrimination can pursue remedies through two different paths. The 1968 act provides for federal solutions—complaints to HUD, administrative hearings, federal lawsuits. The 1866 act, through Section 1983, provides for private civil suits. In practice, this means victims can pursue both tracks simultaneously, using federal enforcement mechanisms while also seeking damages through civil litigation.

The Matthew Shepard Act: Filling the Gaps

The original Civil Rights Act of 1968 had a significant omission: it didn't protect against hate crimes based on sexual orientation or gender identity. This gap persisted for decades.

In 2009, Congress passed the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act, named for two men whose murders had galvanized the nation. Matthew Shepard was a gay college student tortured and murdered in Wyoming in 1998. James Byrd Jr. was a Black man murdered in Texas the same year by white supremacists who dragged him behind a pickup truck.

The Shepard-Byrd Act expanded federal hate crime law to include crimes motivated by the victim's actual or perceived sexual orientation, gender identity, or disability. It complemented the 1968 act's protections by covering categories of people who had been left out of the original legislation.

The Long Shadow of Housing Discrimination

More than fifty years after the Fair Housing Act became law, the effects of historical housing discrimination continue to shape American life. The neighborhoods that were redlined in the 1930s—marked as "hazardous" for mortgage lending because of their racial composition—still show higher rates of poverty, worse health outcomes, and lower property values than neighborhoods that received favorable ratings.

This is the thing about housing discrimination: its effects compound over time. Homeownership has historically been the primary way middle-class American families build wealth. When Black families were systematically excluded from homeownership in desirable neighborhoods, they were excluded from wealth accumulation. That wealth gap—or more accurately, that wealth chasm—persists to this day.

The Fair Housing Act didn't solve these problems. It couldn't. No law can instantly undo centuries of discrimination or erase the intergenerational effects of wealth extraction. What the law did was establish a legal framework that made continued discrimination illegal and enforceable. It set a baseline standard for what American housing practices should look like.

Whether we've lived up to that standard is a different question.

The Unfinished Story

The Civil Rights Act of 1968 represents both triumph and tragedy. It was a landmark achievement—the culmination of a decade of civil rights activism, the answer to housing discrimination practices that had shaped American cities for generations. But it came at a terrible cost, propelled into law by riots sparked by the assassination of the movement's greatest leader.

It also remains unfinished business. Fair housing violations continue to occur. Testing studies—where matched pairs of applicants, differing only in race, apply for the same housing—consistently show discrimination against Black and Hispanic applicants. Algorithmic discrimination in mortgage lending has emerged as a new frontier of concern. The integration the law was designed to promote has proceeded slowly, if at all, in many American metropolitan areas.

But the law itself stands. It established that housing discrimination is not just morally wrong but legally prohibited, with real enforcement mechanisms and real consequences. It extended civil rights protections to Native Americans. It created a framework that has been expanded over the decades to protect more and more categories of people.

On April 11, 1968—one week after Martin Luther King Jr. was killed—Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1968 into law. The country was burning. The future was uncertain. But the law, at least, was finally on the books.