Pre-1968 black homeownership required luck and strategy because legal housing discrimination was still rampant

Evidence

Before the Fair Housing Act was passed in 1968, black homeownership was mostly achieved through a mix of luck and strategy. Take my parents, James and Dottie, who bought a three-family home at 1061 Morris Avenue in the Bronx in 1964. At that time, only 38 percent of black Americans (compared with 64 percent of white Americans) were homeowners, and the Fair Housing Act, which made race discrimination in housing illegal, was still four years away. — Dorothy A. Brown, The Whiteness of Wealth, 167

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s existing work on structural mechanisms of the racial wealth gap and to the previous chapter’s framing of homeownership as the primary wealth-building tool.
• QUESTION: The 38% vs 64% gap in 1964 — is there an even earlier baseline worth quoting for the chapter’s argument, like the 1940 numbers coming at location 171?