The Fair Housing Movement: An Overview and a Case Study

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.