Congress, not the courts, ended legal racial housing discrimination in 1968

Evidence

By 1957, Levitt and Sons had built “Levittowns” in New York and Pennsylvania, and William Levitt was planning to construct a third one in New Jersey. On June 5, 1958, he described that project as one that “would be for white purchasers only.” As late as February 1960, he was fighting in court for his right to “exclud[e] Negroes from homes supported by FHA mortgage insurance.” It took Congress to fix what the Supreme Court had wrought twenty years earlier, when it declared private racial discrimination in housing constitutional. Not until 1968, with the passage of the Fair Housing Act, did Levitt have to stop discriminating against would-be homebuyers on the basis of race. — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations, 371

Categorization

• QUESTION: Brown implies a 1948 Supreme Court ruling (likely Shelley v. Kraemer) was too narrow, allowing private discrimination to persist for 20 more years — worth pinning down the exact case and how it failed black homebuyers.