The 17th Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Dr. Ben Carson.
President Trump’s Secretary of Housing, Ben Carson, is being sued by civil rights
advocates for what they see as his failure to enforce the Fair Housing Act, a landmark
law that turned 50 years old this year.
Ending housing discrimination was a key demand of activists like Martin Luther King Jr. who,
in 1966, brought his protest movement north to Chicago, one of the most segregated cities
in America.
Take a bath the next time before you come here!
Back to the jungle you guys!
Back to the jungle!
I have never seen, even in Mississippi and Alabama, mobs as hostile and as hate-filled
as I have seen in Chicago.
Congress had banned discrimination in employment in 1964, and in voting in 1965.
But when it came to housing, there was resistance, even though government policies helped create
segregated neighborhoods in the first place.
Senator Walter Mondale held hearings on housing discrimination.
As a young senator, no one else would touch it.
They were afraid of it; so I took it.
We had a witness who was really powerful there.
He was a young, handsome, black naval officer, very successful in the Navy and so he was
brought down to the Pentagon in a high position there only to find out he couldn't find housing.
His name was Carlos Campbell.
All I wanted was a place that was near where I worked.
I spent every day, virtually 24/7 a week, looking for housing and I kept getting turned
down and turned down and turned down.
39 places turned me down.
Over the telephone you have space.
When you get there, they don't have space.
It was about what was happening to my fellow warriors, and they all had complaints about
housing.
And there was obviously a pattern of deliberate discrimination against a young man serving
his country.
And I think that turned a lot of people away from the idea of discrimination.
But a tragic event in April 1968 created a new urgency to act.
Dr. Martin Luther King, the apostle of nonviolence in the civil rights movement, has been shot
to death in Memphis, Tennessee.
All over America the black ghettos exploded in rage and grief.
Seven days after King’s assassination, The Fair Housing Act was signed into law.
It banned deliberate housing discrimination and obligated the government to reduce the
segregation that had isolated blacks, often in vast urban housing projects.
The world of the people who live here bears very little resemblance to the American Dream.
In the 1970s, George Romney, President Nixon’s Housing Secretary, wanted to use the law to
help blacks move to the suburbs.
Carlos Campbell went to work for Romney.
He wanted to fight, he wanted to go to the suburbs and he wanted to integrate and he
said you have to solve these issues in the suburbs.
And the President of the United States, Richard Nixon, was not supportive.
I believe that forced integration of the suburbs is not in the national interest.
When you cannot get the support of a president, you just have to sort of, like, throw up your
hands, how do we -- how do we deal with this?
50 years after passage of the Fair Housing Act, many cities remain starkly divided by
race.
No president campaigns on the basis of affecting integrated housing, desegregating the neighborhoods.
Nobody.
And it's a big disappointment to me.
During the Obama administration, communities receiving federal housing funds were ordered
to draft desegregation plans or risk the loss of billions of dollars.
But President Trump’s Housing Secretary Ben Carson has suspended those rules until
at least 2024, prompting the lawsuit to be filed against him.