Fifty years ago, when President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Fair Housing Act of 1968 into law, he proclaimed, “We have passed many civil rights pieces of legislation, but none more important than this.” The Fair Housing Act had the potential to be more significant than the groundbreaking Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 because it did not just outlaw discrimination — it required the government to affirmatively integrate neighborhoods across the nation.
