Low‐Hanging Fruit: The Impoverished History of Housing and School Desegregation

This article assesses the causes and consequences of weak federal enforcement of school and housing desegregation since the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Political actors who acknowledged that state action played a central role in school and residential segregation, and argued that federal, state, and local governments had an obligation to rectify this situation, were uncommon. In examining the efforts of two such individuals—Housing and Urban Development Secretary George Romney and Connecticut Senator Abraham Ribicoff—this article begins to untangle the story of why school desegregation policies rarely reached beyond the most blatant perpetrators of racial separation, and why housing desegregation policies barely got off the ground.