April 11, 1968: The Civil Rights Act of 1968 was signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson. It did two main things. First, it remade the relationship between Native Americans and the U.S. government by expanding the power of the federal government to use U.S. law to impose its will on Native peoples. Second, it reshaped federal housing policy by providing protections from housing discrimination. These protections unfortunately became less effective over time because racism adapted to the specific policies and found other ways to structure society. As scholar Robert W. Lake writes on the evolution of the 1968 legislation, “While segregation and discrimination remain, over time the problems have evolved, are redefined, and reemerge in new forms and guises. New complexities are introduced even as old wounds continue to fester. Cycles of initiative followed by retrenchment mark the historical ebb and flow of civil rights. Further progress is limited not only by the persistence of discrimination and segregation but also by new conditions that have emerged.”
Citations: “Implications of Civil Remedies under the Indian Civil Rights Act,” Michigan Law Review 75, no. 1 (Nov., 1976): 210-211, https://www.jstor.org/stable/1287857; Robert W. Lake, “Postscript: Unresolved Themes in the Evolution of Fair Housing,” in Housing Desegregation and Federal Policy, ed. John M. Goering (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986), 314, https://archive.org/details/housingdesegrega00goer; Historic American Buildings Survey, “2703 Keyworth Avenue (Rowhouse),” photograph (Baltimore, MD, date unknown), https://www.loc.gov/item/md1213/.
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