Although they had been of middle-class income—my grandfather having been in the military and then civil service for his entire adult life—they nonetheless were able to afford several nice homes in “good” neighborhoods, all of which had been entirely white, and as with the apartment complex where I’d grown up, not by accident. Although the Supreme Court, in 1948, had outlawed restrictive covenants barring blacks from these neighborhoods, it had remained legal to discriminate in other ways until the late sixties. Even then, there was little real enforcement of the Fair Housing Act until teeth
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