The Fair Housing Movement: An Overview and a Case Study
The Fair Housing Movement: An Overview and a Case Study
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Date
1965
Authors
Noe, Kaye Sizer
Advisor
Cussler, Margaret T.
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Abstract
The fair housing movement is a recent development in the general
civil rights movement. While subscribing to the ideology of the general
movement, community fair housing groups concentrate upon making
middle-income, and particularly suburban, housing available to financially
qualified Negroes. Few fair housing groups are affiliated with
Negro civil rights groups, and most are all-white in membership. Their
methods utilize many of the concepts first developed in sociology and
social psychology; their programs emphasize community relations when a
Negro move-in is imminent, property listing services which bypass the
practices of discrimination entrenched in the real estate industry, and
subscription by community members to open covenants. They seldom try
to "force" integration using test cases, attempting rather to prevent
discrimination against Negroes seeking homes in their communities and
to avoid violence.
The major portion of the research was a case study of a fair housing
group in Greenbelt, Maryland. The program of this group emphasized
a "planning" approach to integration and publicly avoided the moral-ethical
arguments which have been central in the general civil rights
movement. Such resistance as they encountered was from individuals
concerned about the possible effect of Negro occupancy on property values in the older, low-income section of the city. The leaders of
the group were active in civic activities, representative of most
religious faiths, tended to be college-educated, and many had a history
of affiliation with other "liberal" groups. Few were active in other
facets of the civil rights movement. It was concluded that the fair
housing movement tends to be moderate rather than radical in its membership
and strategy, and that its scope (some 600 groups in metropolitan
areas across the United States) represents near-spontaneous action at
the grass-roots level based on a conviction that discrimination on the
basis of race is wrong.