The MLK Holiday: Open and Fair Housing and Our Unfinished Work

Above image and other photographs from the Chicago Freedom Movement courtesy of the Smithsonian Magazine.

Every January it seems many of us renew our hopes and dreams for our society and communities in the spirit of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr’s legacy.

For those active in housing and homelessness advocacy, the MLK holiday is an opportunity to remind others of the roots the 1968 Fair Housing Act has in Black-led activism, and the unfinished work we all still must undertake to guarantee no one is discriminated when accessing stable and permanent housing.

This year marks the 54th anniversary since the Fair Housing Act became law. The 1965-66 Chicago Freedom Movement (sometimes called the Chicago open housing movement) was the most ambitious civil rights campaign in the U.S. North and is largely credited with inspiring the Act. Rev. Dr. King and his family stayed in Chicago during his organizing with the Freedom Movement. One of many important speeches he gave was at the Chicago Freedom Festival in March 1966 (you can read his full speech here.) That July, Rev. Dr. King spoke on “Freedom Sunday” at Soldier Field followed by a march to City Hall to post a list of open housing demands for the Mayor. Their demands included an end to racist real-estate practices like redlining. Many white Chicagoans responded with violence.

Following the Movements and momentum for justice in 2020, local conversations on racial restrictive covenants in property deeds became more common among many white homeowners and residents. In general, covenants can help protect future affordability or use of a property. However, racial restrictive covenants are like redlining, but instead of a real estate agency and bank deciding who can live where, individual white homeowners or Homeowners Associations decided and stated their prejudice in property deeds. Racial covenants were outlawed with the passage of the Fair Housing Act. Unfortunately, this did not erase racial covenants in deeds already filed. Properties across the country still have these covenants.

In November 2021, the Ann Arbor District Library hosted a panel conversation on how these covenants were in deeds to thousands of homes in Washtenaw County that restricted Black people and other people of color from buying homes here. Earlier in 2021, MLive published an article showing a map of where these deeds were across Ann Arbor. Unsurprisingly, these types of conversations have intersected with discussions related to the #LandBack movement, a push for returning lands to Native peoples.

Washtenaw County has recently implemented a program to help Black residents win rightful ownership of inherited homes. As the article states, “discriminatory practices led many Black families to purchase homes informally generations ago, leaving their descendants with no legal claim to their family homes. But [this] county program is working to change that.”

Hindsight allows us to see the passage of the Fair Housing Act as an almost inevitable outcome. However, the everyday persistence of Black Americans, and their allies, involved in the Freedom Movement came with exhaustion, counterviolence, jail time, racists/segregationists, polarization, political divisions in government, communities, and families, and no guarantees white politicians would be ready and willing to pass progressive and unprecedented legislation.

Many activists today also experience exhaustion and opposition to their efforts to expand fair housing protections for persons identifying as LGBTQIA+ through the proposed “Fair and Equal Housing Act” as well as for low income renters using housing choice vouchers as their Source of Income. Despite the Fair Housing Act protecting a person’s disability from discrimination, disability discrimination complaints are the most common Fair Housing Act complaints received by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), making up over 60% of total complaints. This is also true for discrimination complaints received by nonprofit fair housing organizations.

Of course, fair housing is not the only issue to demand this MLK holiday. Due to recent voting rights news, Dr. Bernice King and Martin Luther King III, Rev. Dr. King’s children, are urging people to march and demand elected officials update and expand voting rights legislation now. There are two bills already introduced and awaiting a vote in the U.S. Senate but have stalled – the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. In December 2021, Governor Whitmer, along with 17 other governors, sent a letter to the U.S. Senate urging the passages of these bills. The Brennan Center For Justice published an article outlining what is at stake if legislation is not passed.

Passing these Acts are critical, but seemingly only possible if the filibuster in the Senate is reformed. In a 1963 interview, Rev. Dr. King shared his frustrations about the filibuster. He stated, “I think the tragedy is that we have a Congress with a Senate that has a minority of misguided senators who will use the filibuster to keep the majority of people from even voting. They won’t let the majority senators vote. And certainly they wouldn’t want the majority of people to vote, because they know they do not represent the majority of the American people. In fact, they represent, in their own states, a very small minority.”

This MLK holiday consider engaging with one or more of these events:

Monday, January 17

1.      University of Michigan’s Annual Symposium: click here for more info and registration

2.      Eastern Michigan University’s “Rising Together For Justice” (Jan 14-17): click here for more info

3.      The King Center’s Annual Holiday Observance: click here for more info

Tuesday, January 18

1.      United Way Washtenaw County’s Advancing Equity Conversation (2nd of 4): click here for more info and to RSVP

2.      W.K. Kellogg Foundation’s 2022 National Day of Racial Healing: click here for more info and to RSVP

…AND keep contacting U.S. Senators to pass the Build Back Better Bill! Make it clear the bill must pass with its current historic investments in rental assistance, public housing, and the Housing Trust Fund for those most in need: click here for the petition

Finally, consider some additional reading and viewing:

The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America by Richard Rothstein, published in 2017

Jim Crow of the North, Season 1 Episode 20 of Minnesota Experience PBS, first aired in 2018

Tenant Talk: The Intersection of Housing and Disability Rights, Fall 2021 I Volume 12, Issue 2, published by National Low Income Housing Coalition

King In The Wilderness, 2018 film by HBO and Kunhardt Films