When Real Estate Agents Led the Fight Against Fair Housing
The new book Freedom to Discriminate argues that the real estate industry’s campaign to defend housing segregation still echoes in today’s politics.
New suburban homes in San Jose, California, circa 1963, when the state was engaged in debate over housing segregation led by its powerful real estate industry.
Photographer: Joe Munroe/Archive Photos via Getty Images
In 1964, nine months after Martin Luther King Jr. gave his “I Have a Dream” speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, a real estate broker and former newspaperman from Fresno, California, delivered a different kind of address. His crusade was part of a “great war” against fair housing laws.
As part of a wide-ranging public relations and political campaign, Lawrence “Spike” Wilson, president of the powerful California Real Estate Association (CREA), gave speeches, devised talking points and created messaging aimed squarely against the Rumford Act, a pioneering fair housing law passed in 1963 that sought to combat the discrimination Black residents faced from landlords and real estate agents. CREA helped lead the statewide fight against the law and in support of Proposition 14, an amendment to repeal the Rumford Act and make it illegal to pass any future such legislation, as well as a national campaign to reposition real estate agents as fighters for free enterprise.