Civil Rights in the Gateway to the South: Louisville, Kentucky, 1945-1980

4. The Battle for Open Housing

111 4 The Battle for Open Housing In May 1963, in the heady atmosphere of optimism that accompanied the passage of Louisville’s open accommodations ordinance, both Mayor William Cowger and civil rights leaders predicted the next step would be the quick adoption of a similar law on open housing. United by the assumptions that housing was the linchpin for undoing segregation in all other parts of life and that if Louisville could accomplish this victory it could be a model for how to overcome what many considered northern racial problems, civil rights advocates set out to secure such a measure. Over the next four years, the open housing issue united myriad organizations in a broad-based campaign that used persuasion, mass demonstrations, and the power of the black vote to attack residential segregation. The combination of tactics employed by this coalition of black and white activists, including many who were brought into the civil rights movement for the first time, demonstrated the flexibility of the local movement and its ability to incorporate strategies acceptable to a number of constituencies. But the prospect of an open housing law also sparked the most vocal and violent opposition to antidiscrimination measures yet seen in Louisville, both on the streets, where mobs of whites heckled and stoned civil rights demonstrators, and in city government. This resistance to integration created disillusionment within the movement and revealed the limits of acceptability of change in the racial status quo. Years before Louisvillians addressed the issue of segregated housing, African Americans and their white allies elsewhere had begun to fight what Eleanor Roosevelt called the “number one civil rights problem in 112 Civil Rights in the Gateway to the South the North.”1 In 1950 the National Committee against Discrimination in Housing, a coalition of civil rights, religious, labor, civil liberties, and other organizations, formed to coordinate efforts in communities across the North and West to change public housing policies, educate white residents to accept black neighbors, help African American families find homes, and, most important, lobby city, state, and federal governments for “fair housing” laws. As a result, between 1957, when New York City passed the first such law covering private residences, and 1967, the height of Louisville’s campaign, forty cities and twentytwo states adopted policies that made discrimination in housing illegal .2 These victories never came easily. Though civil rights advocates argued that fair housing was the “logical sequel to fair employment and fair education,” government policies, assumptions by real estate and financial professionals about property values, persistent economic inequalities, and white prejudice made housing segregation a much more complex and volatile subject. Even many whites who accepted integrated schools and businesses objected to African Americans moving into their neighborhoods and to government regulation of the most private space, the home. Both opponents and advocates realized the issue was crucial because, regardless of official policies, residential segregation or integration helped determine the extent of actual mixing in schools, in public accommodations, and even in workplaces. Over time, attacks on “forced housing” and declarations of homeowners’ rights to control their property not only slowed down but reversed fair housing gains.3 This rising wave of opposition to open housing was part of a backlash among white Americans against further racial and social change that, in combination with burgeoning black power ideology, changed the context for civil rights struggles across the nation. The passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts marked the high point of white public support outside the South for equal rights. Thereafter, perceptions that too much was changing too fast, combined with hostile reactions to the violent confrontations between African Americans and police in summer riots after 1964, emboldened whites to resist further antidiscrimination policies. At the same time, the rising black power movement, with its critique of integration and call for black dominance of the freedom struggle, created divisions within the civil rights movement , led white moderates and liberals to distance themselves, and fur- The Battle for Open Housing 113 ther stoked public and political resistance. Thus Louisville civil rights advocates launched the movement for open housing, declaring it the inevitable next step after open accommodations, just as the political climate for it became more hostile. The open housing movement in Louisville began in the spring of 1963, when the Louisville Defender argued that since nearby states, including Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio—common benchmarks for local African American...