By Nikole Hannah-Jones | ProPublica
The authors of the 1968 Fair Housing Act wanted to reverse decades of government-fostered segregation. But presidents from both parties declined to enforce a law that stirred vehement opposition.
A few months after Congress passed a landmark law directing the federal government to dismantle segregation in the nation’s housing, President Nixon’s housing chief began plotting a stealth campaign.
The plan, George Romney wrote in a confidential memo to aides, was to use his power as secretary of Housing and Urban Development to remake America’s housing patterns, which he described as a “high-income white noose” around the black inner city.
The 1968 Fair Housing Act, passed months earlier in the tumultuous aftermath of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, directed the government to “affirmatively further” fair housing. Romney believed those words gave him the authority to pressure predominantly white communities to build more affordable housing and end discriminatory zoning practices.
Romney ordered HUD officials to reject applications for water, sewer and highway projects from cities and states where local policies fostered segregated housing.
He dubbed his initiative “Open Communities” and did not clear it with the White House. As word spread that HUD was turning down grants, Nixon’s supporters in the South and in white Northern suburbs took their complaints directly to the president.
Nixon intervened immediately.
“Stop this one,” Nixon scrawled in a note on a memo written by John Ehrlichman, his domestic policy chief.
In a 1972 “eyes only” memo to Ehrlichman and H.R. Haldeman, another aide, Nixon explained his position. “I am convinced that while legal segregation is totally wrong that forced integration of housing or education is just as wrong,” he wrote.
The president understood the consequences: “I realize that this position will lead us to a situation in which blacks will continue to live for the most part in black neighborhoods and where there will be predominately black schools and predominately white schools.”
Romney, the former governor of Michigan and father of Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, held his ground. Notations and memos in his private papers show that he viewed the blighted black ghettos as a root cause of the inner-city riots of the 1960s. “Equal opportunity for all Americans in education and housing is essential if we are going to keep our nation from being torn apart,” he wrote in talking points he drew up for a meeting with the president.
Romney’s stance made him a pariah within the administration. Nixon shut down the program, refused to meet with his housing secretary and finally drove him from the Cabinet.
Over the next four decades, a ProPublica investigation shows, a succession of presidents — Democrat and Republican alike — followed Nixon’s lead, declining to use the leverage of HUD’s billions to fight segregation.
Their reluctance to enforce a law passed by both houses of Congress and repeatedly upheld by the courts reflects a larger political reality. Again and again, attempts to create integrated neighborhoods have foundered in the face of vehement opposition from homeowners.
“The lack of political courage around these issues is stunning,” said Elizabeth Julian, a former senior HUD official. “The failures of fair housing are not just by HUD but by the country.”
Nixon’s vision for America largely came to pass and the costs have been steep. More than 20 years of research has implicated residential segregation in virtually every aspect of racial inequality, from higher unemployment rates for African Americans, to poorer health care, to elevated infant mortality rates and, most of all, to inferior schools.
HUD’s largest program of grants to states, cities and towns has delivered $137 billion to more than 1,200 communities since 1974. To receive the money, localities are supposed to identify obstacles to fair housing, keep records of their efforts to overcome them, and certify that they do not discriminate.
ProPublica could find only two occasions since Romney’s tenure in which the department withheld money from communities for violating the Fair Housing Act. In several instances, records show, HUD has sent grants to communities even after they’ve been found by courts to have promoted segregated housing or been sued by the U.S. Department of Justice. New Orleans, for example, has continued to receive grants after the Justice Department sued it for violating that Fair Housing Act by blocking a low-income housing project in a wealthy historic neighborhood.
ProPublica submitted 41 questions to HUD about its failure to use its authority to promote integrated housing. It issued a statement which did not address that issue but said the agency has worked hard to enforce provisions of the law that bar discrimination against individuals.
Scholars have traced the history of housing segregation in several notable books and articles. ProPublica has obtained new documents and interviewed key figures in the four-decade battle over the Fair Housing Act.
Present and former officials in HUD’s Office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity said their attempts to enforce the 1968 law were met with indifference or opposition from the agency’s senior officials.
The office has the smallest staff and budget of HUD’s four major programs. Several officials in key positions said they had never been trained to enforce the law’s requirement to “affirmatively further” fair housing. In most cases, HUD does not even check the paperwork filed by cities and states about their efforts to deal with segregation and other issues that stymie integrated housing; it simply writes checks.
“People say integration has failed,” said Julian, an assistant secretary for fair housing during the Clinton administration. “It hasn’t failed because it’s never been tried.”
The Fair Housing Act was the most contentious of the civil rights-era legislation, blocked for years by Northern and Southern senators alike. It took infernos in more than 125 cities following King’s assassination to force the bill’s revival.
Former Vice President Walter Mondale, the floor manager of the legislation as a freshman senator from Minnesota, said King’s death provided a powerful but brief urgency to eradicate the nation’s ghettos.
Other laws and presidential orders have integrated the military, opened opportunities for higher education and provided protections against workplace discrimination.
But despite the Fair Housing Act, levels of residential segregation have barely budged in many of the large metropolitan areas where most African Americans live.
Today, as in the 1960s, many argue that the separation of the races is a matter of personal choice. But numerous surveys show that African Americans, more than any other group, want to live in integrated neighborhoods.
Others say income disparities are behind the color-coded American metropolises, that lower-income African Americans simply can’t afford to live in wealthier white areas. Yet black Americans earning $75,000 a year typically live in poorer neighborhoods than white Americans earning $40,000 a year, according to an analysis of census data by John Logan of Brown University.
Mondale said the law “hasn’t created this integrated vision that we were talking about. One of the great moral failings of our country, despite the Great Society and despite what we tried to do, is the deprival of justice for the people who have come from behind. It’s something I worked on all of my life and I am very disheartened by it.”
The Obama administration — prodded by private lawsuits — had done somewhat more than its predecessors. It had taken the unprecedented step of withholding money from Joliet, Ill., and Westchester, N.Y., for not meeting civil rights obligations.
But advocates said the administration had fallen far short of its promises to reform this broken system. After nearly four years, federal housing officials had yet to issue regulations that would have precisely defined what communities need to do to “affirmatively further” fair housing.
Perhaps the starkest measure of the law’s squandered potential is how little the torrent of federal dollars released by its passage has done to integrate U.S. communities.
Over the last two decades, taxpayers have sent $400 million in HUD block grants to Milwaukee, to no discernible effect. Milwaukee remains locked in a tie with Detroit for the title of America’s most segregated metropolitan area for African Americans.
New York City, home to the nation’s largest black population, has reeled in $4 billion in block grants since 1993. Yet in that time, demographers say, racial segregation has eased by just 3 percent. Today, 80 percent of black New Yorkers would have to move to create a city in which they were evenly integrated with whites.
Myron Orfield, a professor at the University of Minnesota Law School and one of the nation’s leading experts on segregation, said when the federal government abandoned Romney’s efforts it turned away from a critical opportunity to reshape American life.
“Segregation would have been cut by half and possibly eliminated,” Orfield said. “The country would have been very different.”
Hopes of the Great Migration Quickly Fade
In the first decades of the 20th century, African Americans began to resist the brutally oppressive post-Civil War South the only way they could — with their feet. Sneaking onto trains, they traded the tobacco and cotton fields of steamy Southern towns for the cold winters and cramped tenements of the North.
When the Great Migration began in 1910, just 10 percent of black Americans lived outside the South. Six decades later, nearly half of the country’s 22.5 million African Americans called other states home. In all, 6 million African Americans left the South, a flow of humanity that redrew the nation’s racial map.
The migrants sought jobs in booming Northern cities such as New York, Chicago, Milwaukee, Cleveland, Detroit and Philadelphia. In the early years, they moved into white neighborhoods, rarely living in places that were more than 30 percent black, according to sociologists Douglas Massey of Princeton University and Nancy Denton of the State University of New York at Albany.
It didn’t last.
Cities and towns began adopting zoning codes that designated neighborhoods as all-white and all-black. When the U.S. Supreme Court struck down those laws as unconstitutional, real estate agents wrote “codes of ethics” that included bans on selling homes to African Americans outside of black areas. In some cities, white residents responded to the arrival of black families with riots, home bombings, and cross burnings. They formed associations dedicated to blocking even a single black family from moving in.
White communities also embraced racial covenants — legal language in deeds that barred any subsequent purchaser from selling to African Americans.
Still, African Americans kept moving north. By 1930, the black population in Northern cities had grown by 40 percent as another 1 million left the South.
Around this time the federal government began promoting the racial division of Northern cities, primarily through New Deal loan programs.
The Home Owners’ Loan Corporation, created in 1933, introduced the practice of redlining, marking in red ink swaths of cities in which it would not lend. It rated white neighborhoods as the least risky and black neighborhoods as the most. It would not lend to a black person seeking to buy in a white neighborhood, or vice versa.
When the Federal Housing Administration opened its doors a year later, it adopted the same practices. As a result, 98 percent of the loans the FHA insured between 1934 and 1962 went to white borrowers. The policies encouraged white flight as even neighborhoods with small numbers of African Americans were rated as “hazardous.” White residents who didn’t mind black neighbors found their home values decreasing as the government refused to insure mortgages for new buyers.
A 1938 manual for the FHA encouraged officials to avoid mixing “inharmonious racial or nationality groups” and “the occupancy of properties except by the race for which they are intended.”
With the end of World War II, a grateful nation made available vast amounts of credit to returning soldiers, who could borrow money through the GI Bill to buy their dream homes in the suburbs.
But banks often refused to approve loans for black soldiers attempting to use the GI Bill to buy homes. The Veterans Administration and the FHA officially supported racial covenants banning African Americans in new suburban developments until 1950, refusing to underwrite loans that would bring “incompatible” racial groups into newly created white areas.
Federal housing and development programs worked alongside state and local governments to bulldoze black and integrated neighborhoods for redevelopment and relocate African Americans to designated city corridors.
In their place, the government built public housing towers, home to thousands and thousands of people, nearly all of whom were black.
“As the new century wore on, areas of acceptable black residence became more and more narrowly circumscribed. The era of the ghetto had begun,” Massey and Denton wrote in their book “American Apartheid.”
As the boundaries of black neighborhoods expanded, white residents began to abandon cities altogether. Once again, federal policies accelerated segregation.
The government built highways and mass transit systems that made it possible for millions of white Americans to work in the inner city yet live in the suburbs.
It took just 60 years — not even a lifetime — to divide communities in nearly every metropolitan area along racial lines. Northern cities had become the most segregated in the country, analysis of census data shows.
LBJ Tries to Change Minds in the ’60s
When the 1960s brought protests in the South against Jim Crow laws, civil rights leaders found an unlikely ally in the White House.
President Lyndon B. Johnson brushed aside the Southern leaders of his own party, pushing through landmark legislation that outlawed discrimination in voting, employment, public accommodations and public education.
One issue remained beyond the reach of Johnson’s legendary persuasive skills: housing.
The president had contemplated introducing fair housing legislation as early as 1964, but his staff advised against it.
Johnson persisted, arguing that residential segregation was the wellspring of all other racial inequities. Just as Congress was passing some of the most far-reaching civil rights laws since Reconstruction, Northern ghettos erupted. In the three years before King’s assassination, African Americans took to the streets in more than 100 cities. The rioting prompted Johnson to press harder for legislation to undo the nation’s segregated housing patterns.
In 1966, he turned for help to Mondale, a 38-year-old senator from Minnesota not long into his first term. A former majority leader, Johnson held personal relationships with the Senate’s most powerful figures. But housing was so toxic an issue, the president couldn’t find anyone else to lead the fight.
“I was young and I thought I could do anything,” said Mondale, now grayer but still an optimist. “I was a bit flattered that I’d get a bill that was so important.”
With the help of co-sponsors Mondale and Edward Brooke of Massachusetts, then the only African American in the Senate, Johnson proposed a bill to ban discrimination in the sale or rental of housing. It went nowhere.
Mondale understood why his liberal colleagues were discomfited by the measure. If it came to the floor, pressure from constituents would force them to vote against it, making them look like hypocrites.
“A lot of civil rights was about making the South behave and taking the teeth from George Wallace,” Mondale said, referring to the famously racist governor of Alabama who ran for president in 1964, 1968, 1972 and 1976. “This came right to the neighborhoods across the country. This was civil rights getting personal.”
Johnson, who had considered the 1966 housing bill his most devastating political defeat, did not back down. In the summer of 1967, Mondale called a black veteran to testify. Decorated for his service in Vietnam, Carlos Campbell had been appointed to a job in the Pentagon. Standing rigid in a crisp white uniform, he told the Senate housing and urban affairs subcommittee how he and his wife were unable to rent an apartment in the white neighborhoods near his new post in Arlington, Va., even with the help of the Defense Department’s housing office.
“Up until the spring of 1965 I was largely convinced that our racial problems were rapidly diminishing and that education, professional credibility, and financial integrity were the necessary vehicles for obtaining full rights as a citizen,” Campbell said. Once off the military base, he said, he’d been forced to “re-examine my philosophy.” The man who had, in his own words, been entrusted with “safeguarding the nation’s most delicate secrets” told senators that he had been turned away from more than 36 apartments because of his race.
“I remember old Dick Russell, that old segregationist, said, ‘I am for segregation, but how do we tell black Americans who have fought and died for us that they have to go back in the box?’” Mondale said. “That was always the Achilles’ heel, and this helped bring that to the front.”
Minds were slowly changing. But the bill died again.
Two developments revived it.
Johnson had asked a blue-ribbon panel to study the riots and make recommendations on how to prevent such violence in the future.
The Kerner Commission’s searing conclusion — that the United States was “moving toward two societies, one black, one white — separate and unequal” — is enshrined in the history books.
What is less well-remembered was the basis for that finding. The commission blamed housing segregation for the riots. “What white Americans have never fully understood — but what the Negro can never forget — is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto,” the panel wrote. “White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it.” The report called for a federal fair housing law.
Days later, on April 4, 1968, an assassin killed King on the balcony of a Memphis motel. Black communities again exploded in riots.
Washington, D.C., which had recently become majority black, was among the hardest hit. Mondale recalled flying over the nation’s capital in a helicopter thinking, “By God, it looks like Vietnam.”
“You could see the fires from the Capitol and the whole place seemed to be in flames,” he said. “The city was locked down, the Capitol was under guard, and nobody knew what was going to happen. The nation came close to pulling apart.”
Many lawmakers shared Mondale’s fear that the horrific conditions of the nation’s ghettos had set the stage for a cycle of deepening violence and confrontation.
Johnson used the shock following King’s assassination to his advantage, urging Congress to pass the long-delayed housing bill as a tribute to the slain leader.
The housing legislation, Mondale said, had been the most filibustered bill in history. But when lawmakers took up the bill this time, “They didn’t dare,” Mondale recalled. “They didn’t dare hold it up.”
Just six days after King died, Congress passed Title VIII of the 1968 Civil Rights Act, commonly known as the Fair Housing Act. As the votes in the House were tallied — 250-171 — armed National Guardsmen ringed the Capitol to protect Congress from the rioters in burning slums just a few blocks away.
Johnson signed the bill into law April 11. “We have passed many civil rights pieces of legislation,” he said. “But none is more important than this.”
The law banned racial discrimination in the sale or rental of housing, block busting (in which real estate agents move a black family into a white neighborhood and use it to frighten white homeowners into selling, turning the neighborhood from white to black), racial steering (in which real estate agents steer home seekers to racially distinct neighborhoods), and intimidation and coercion.
Then it went a step further. The law required federal officials to do everything possible to “affirmatively further” fair housing. This odd turn of phrase, which was not further defined, distinguished the housing law from almost all other civil rights legislation. It didn’t just ban discrimination. It charged the government to act to bring about “integrated and balanced living patterns,” according to Mondale’s statements at the time.
To accomplish this, the law directed HUD to create a civil rights office that would enforce the new law. According to Brooke, the intent was to enable the government to “withhold funds or defer action” to dismantle segregation.
By including this provision, lawmakers were acknowledging that previous statutes and presidential orders addressing housing discrimination had been ignored. President Kennedy had signed an executive order in 1962 banning discrimination in federally subsidized housing. Nothing changed. The 1964 civil rights law banned racial discrimination by any agency that received federal money. It, too, made no difference.
Mondale and the bill’s floor managers made concessions to secure the law’s passage that weakened HUD’s enforcement powers.
One key compromise limited HUD’s ability to punish discriminatory landlords and real estate agents. The original draft envisioned a mounting schedule of fines. The final version gave HUD only the authority to seek voluntary settlements. If landlords refused, the agency could do nothing but inform those complaining of discrimination to file private lawsuits. Moreover, by capping damages for successful claims at $1,000, the act made such lawsuits thoroughly impractical.
Mondale viewed the law as a first step, envisaging a succession of bills that would address weaknesses in the Fair Housing Act.
From the start, HUD was whipsawed by conflicting mandates. Cobbled together from agencies that just a few years earlier had openly pushed segregation, HUD was supposed to transform itself into a force for civil rights. Not surprisingly, the agency’s predominant focus remained on creating housing as fast as possible.
“For 40 years we tried to get interest in enforcement,” Mondale said. “There have been many times that I have been disappointed with federal enforcement of this law.”
Nixon’s“ Serious Romney Problem”
Johnson never got an opportunity to administer the law. Battered by protests over the Vietnam War, he declined to run for re-election. Hubert Humphrey, his vice president, lost a closely contested election to Richard Nixon, a Republican whose winning coalition was built around former Southern Democrats and white Northerners.
Nixon named an avowed opponent of housing segregation as his first secretary of Housing and Urban Development.
George Romney, who unsuccessfully ran against Nixon early in the presidential campaign, had championed housing integration as governor in his home state of Michigan.
The 1967 Detroit riots, which destroyed 2,000 buildings and took 43 lives, profoundly affected Romney. On the night National Guard and Army combat troops backed by tanks finally quelled the violence, Romney delivered a “Report to the People” that was broadcast statewide.
“Some already are saying the answer is brute force such as would be used on mad dogs,” the governor said. “Others are questioning present social and economic programs because they claim Negroes don’t appreciate what has already been done.”
“Some white people and public officials will advocate the return to state’s rights as a way to legalize segregation,” he continued. “As citizens of Michigan, as Americans, we must unhesitatingly reject all these divisive courses.”
Instead, Romney enacted a statewide fair housing law. He called for an end to local zoning that encouraged segregation and for the creation of low-cost housing throughout metropolitan Detroit and the state.
“Force alone will not eliminate riots,” Romney wrote in letters responding to angry citizens. “We must eliminate the problems from which they stem.”
Romney knew his ideas went against the grain of the Nixon administration, but his papers, housed at the University of Michigan’s Bentley Historical Library, show that he viewed open housing as a moral obligation regardless of political cost.
So Romney and his staff crafted a secret agenda to use HUD’s powers under the 1968 act. Romney staff members debated how much to let the White House, and the public, know about their efforts.
In a memo to Romney dated Aug. 15, 1969, HUD Undersecretary Richard Van Dusen said that federal housing subsidies, along with urban renewal policies and suburban water and sewer grants, had increased segregation. Those same programs, or the threatened loss of them, could be used to integrate suburbs that counted on the money but also blocked the construction of affordable housing.
The memo anticipated opposition from Nixon, Congress, the Republican Party and mayors.
“Judgments must be made as to what steps may be taken quietly and without formal policy announcement,” the memo said. “It seems probable that a frontal attack which publicly seeks to redress the ghetto problem would arouse major political opposition.”
Soon after, Romney launched his Open Communities program. Separately, he ordered his staff to draft legislation that allowed the government to override local zoning that kept out federally subsidized housing.
“Romney recognized these places got a lot of stuff from the federal government,” said Orfield, the University of Minnesota law professor. “And Romney said if the federal government is going to build you a new freeway and sewer systems — the government was footing about 80 percent of the cost — you are not going to build communities at the end of those freeway and sewer systems for only affluent white people.”
Romney’s campaign achieved some initial successes. HUD terminated grants to the Boston, Baltimore and Toledo metro areas after they rejected low-income housing slated for white neighborhoods, and won concessions.
The program could not be kept secret for long. On June 22, 1970, Nixon’s most trusted domestic adviser, John Ehrlichman, sent Romney a note.
“The White House is receiving the strongest sort of representations regarding the proposed ‘open communities’ policy,” he wrote. “This proposal has not had the usual policy review...May I ask the present status...?”
Romney sent back a less-than-truthful reply. The department had not created a new policy, he wrote. It was merely reviewing “a range of alternatives.”
A month later, the new HUD chief decided to test the program in territory he knew well — the 99 percent-white Detroit suburb of Warren. The once-sleepy town had undergone a population boom as whites fled Detroit in the ’60s. Its residents were openly hostile to the idea of African Americans moving into their town. After local police failed to protect an interracial couple who’d moved there, then-Gov. Romney dispatched the state police.
Romney told Warren that HUD would withhold federal dollars if the city didn’t agree to build affordable housing. Warren’s mayor pleaded for leniency. Romney stood firm, saying: “Black people have just as much right to equal opportunities as we do.”
Local officials in Warren complained in a letter to the White House about HUD’s “integrationist misfits.” The president responded immediately, denying the White House had a plan to tie HUD dollars to integration. He ordered Romney to release the money.
The confrontation over Warren marked a critical moment in the history of the Fair Housing Act. For the first time enforcement of the law collided with the political realities of a president thinking about re-election.
In the weeks after the Warren case, Southern congressmen angrily assailed Romney’s plans to integrate the suburbs, particularly in metropolitan Atlanta.
Sen. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, segregationist candidate for president in 1948, and other southern leaders took their complaints directly to Nixon. “We in the South are motivated by race,” Georgia Congressman Fletcher Thompson told the president, according to notes from the session. The group warned that Nixon appeared “anti-South” because of Romney’s actions. Some Southerners, they said, had derisively begun to refer to Nixon as “Mister Integrator.”
Remarkably, Romney continued to press ahead with his Open Communities program. By the fall of 1970, Nixon had lost patience with his HUD secretary. A memo from Ehrlichman outlining options for Nixon’s “Post-Southern strategy” for the 1972 campaign called HUD’s effort to integrate the suburbs “a serious Romney problem which we will apparently have as long as he is here.”
“This is no approved program,” Ehrlichman wrote. “But he keeps loudly talking about it in spite of our efforts to shut him up.”
Not long after, Nixon asked Romney to leave the Cabinet and become U.S. ambassador to Mexico.
Romney turned down the job. In a Nov. 16, 1970, letter, he said he understood that the president believed they were “on a collision course because of a difference in ideology with respect to the racial aspects of HUD’s programs.” He asked for a meeting “to discuss my views personally with you.”
At the end of the letter, Romney again made his argument for integration. “It is becoming increasingly clear that the lower, middle income and the poor, white, black and brown family, cannot continue to be isolated in the deteriorating core cities without broad scale revolution.” He underlined the words.
Nixon froze Romney out, refusing to meet with the HUD secretary.
Weeks later, as the year came to a close, Romney, isolated and disgruntled, prepared notes for his long-delayed conversation with the president.
“President only wants yes-man,” he wrote before outlining the same concerns — suburban integration and HUD funding — that had enraged Nixon. It appears the meeting never took place.
With Romney unwilling to take the ambassadorship, Nixon decided that he, not HUD, would set the nation’s policy on fair housing. The president asked his staff to figure out just how narrowly he could construe the Fair Housing Act. He began referring publicly to Romney’s approach as “forced integration.”
Nixon’s special counsel, Leonard Garment, tried to craft a strategy consistent with both the courts’ interpretations of the law and Nixon’s political needs. White House aides hoped that Garment would come up with a rationale for confining the fair housing law to overt acts of discrimination. But when Garment studied the court cases, he concluded this was not possible. Again and again, federal judges had interpreted the “further fair housing phrase” to mean that the federal government had an active role to play in desegregation.
Ehrlichman shopped for another opinion, turning to Tom Stoel, a lawyer who worked in the president’s executive office. Stoel argued that the government could restrict enforcement of the law to “cases of individual discrimination” and need not get involved in zoning issues or press communities to build affordable housing. This would “avoid any hint of ‘forced integration’” but, he warned, “may not fulfill the Government’s obligation under the law.’
Ignoring Stoel’s caution, Nixon ordered HUD to stop all efforts to pressure cities and states to foster integrated housing.
As the Nixon White House geared up for the 1972 re-election campaign, Romney gave up. “Developments in recent months and days have convinced me that you are no longer interested in my counsel and advice before making policy and operating decisions directly affecting the activities of the Department I head,” Romney wrote to Nixon in August 1972. “Consequently, I have concluded more can be accomplished in the future if the Department is headed by someone whose counsel and advice you want.”
Though Romney’s formal resignation letter in November 1972 made no reference to the civil rights battle that had been his downfall, insiders may well have detected an ironic turn of phrase in the words he chose.
“I want to thank you for the privilege of serving the nation under your great leadership,” Romney wrote. “The experience has been a rewarding and invaluable one that, among other things, has deepened my understanding of our country’s political processes.”
With that, the federal government’s only large-scale effort to integrate the segregated suburbs it helped create sputtered to a close. The Fair Housing Act was just four years old.
