The Fair Housing Act provided for modest enforcement, and civil rights groups have used this law, rather than the earlier statute, to challenge housing discrimination. But when they did so, we lost sight of the fact that housing discrimination did not become unlawful in 1968; it had been so since 1866. Indeed, throughout those 102 years, housing discrimination was not only unlawful but was the imposition of a badge of slavery that the Constitution mandates us to remove.
