Fifty years ago, just a week after Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated and cities went up in flames — President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Fair Housing Act. For the first time, housing discrimination was illegal.
The law also did something else: It required cities to “affirmatively further fair housing” — that is, to actively eliminate segregation in their communities.
Civil rights advocates hoped the law would be the key to finally ending the extreme racial segregation around the country. But enforcement of the law was sporadic at best, and a half-century later, segregation remains deeply entrenched in the United States. In fact, some of the nation’s most diverse cities — those with large non-white populations — are among the most segregated.
[For more on this story by Teresa Wiltz, go to http://www.pewtrusts.org/en/re...ion-in-the-trump-era]
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