ABSTRACT

Despite long-standing discrimination and patterns of segregation, and the enactment of other significant civil rights legislation in the 1960s, the Fair Housing Act was by no means a foregone conclusion as the decade was coming to an end. The legislative battle that resulted in enactment of the 1968 act was the result of many debates, demonstrations, and, ultimately, compromises. It took the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. to finally get Congress to pass the law.