After a bitter twelve-day floor fight, the House last week produced a fair-housing bill that gave the Johnson Administration several slices less than half a loaf. The President wanted a law that would forbid racial discrimination in the sale or rental of all housing in the U.S. The House balked at such a sweeping measure. It voted to exempt individual owners who make no more than two sales a year and landlords who rent buildings with no more than four units and live on the premises. The bill thus covers 23 million of the nation's 60 million housing units (only 6,000,000 of them in the suburbs), leaving 60% of all U.S. housing and virtually all private houses unaffected by its provisions. And there are signs that the Senate may refuse to swallow even the remaining two-fifths of the loaf when the bill comes before it next month.
An Inescapable Fact. The open-housing provision is one of the most controversial in years, not only because it affects deeply ingrained feelings for the rights of private property, but because it also promises to affect the North far more profoundly than any previous civil rights measure. Since the 1930s, more than 3,000,000 Southern Negroes have flowed into the major cities of the North and West in a tide that has created ghettos from New York to Los Angeles and prompted white families to move to the suburbs. Though the objections of property owners to the open-housing provision range from doubts about the measure's constitutionality to skepticism about its enforceability, many and perhaps most of them are based on a sad but inescapable fact: Americans as a whole are not yet prepared to live side by side with Negroes in racially mixed communities, and resent pressures to force the Negro on them.
Sponsored by Maryland's Charles McC. Mathias Jr., 44, a liberal Republican serving his third term from a district in which few Negroes reside, the watered-down open-housing provision that finally did pass scared the living daylights out of many Congressmen. With the elections not far off, everyone could recall how California's voters rejected the Rumford fair-housing act by a 2 to 1 margin in 1964, defeating Democratic Senatorial Candidate Pierre Salinger, a Rumford backer, in the process. With Congressmen worried about their constituents' reactions, even the gutted provision could muster only a 179 to 179 tie in a crucial test vote, which then was broken in favor of the open-housing measure by the chairman.
On a Par. The main line of defense for those who oppose open-housing legislation is their contention that it violates the absolute right of property. Senate Republican Leader Everett Dirksen, without whose support the 1964 and 1965 civil rights bills would have been defeated, sincerely considers the housing measure "absolutely unconstitutional" and intends to fight it to the death in the Senate. Even many Northern liberals confess that they are disturbed by the idea of depriving a man of the right to sell his property to anyone he likes. It is an idea that appears to go against the American grain; but the fact is that the concept of unassailable property rights has little support in law or custom.