We celebrate Martin Luther King’s birthday Monday with an ever-growing admiration for his blend of practical and philosophical campaigns against segregation and inequality. Dr. King’s ministerial eloquence and his realpolitik strikes and marches and rallies helped break down walls and prejudices and spark the new birth of freedom President Lincoln called for 150 years ago.
Does Dr. King have a housing legacy in addition to his busting up of an appalling segregation in the United States that was not much different than apartheid? An interesting section of Taylor Branch’s three-volume bio of Dr. King details at least one instance of it.
In 1966, after the successes of the Birmingham “Children’s Crusade” and the epic march on the Alabama capital after the “Bloody Sunday” of Selma, Dr. King headed north, to Chicago.
According to Branch, Dr. King was surprised by the strength and depth of racial prejudice in the North, and his campaign there was broken off before its objectives were reached. But while there, Dr. King moved into inner-city housing to show solidarity for the ill-housed of Chicago.
A publicity stunt? Many politicians (including a subsequent mayor of Chicago) have followed suit on moving into housing projects, but this may have been a first of its kind. Dr. King’s wife’s dismay at the housing conditions she found herself in speaks eloquently of the reality of the situation.
It’s interesting to extrapolate this out to today. If Dr. King was alive today (he’d be 84, so that’s not impossible) he’d certainly take note of the fact that homeownership rates for minority populations are lower than those of the dominant culture. And he’d be dismayed that he could find equally dismal housing to move into today in the inner city of Chicago and just about any other big city we might name.
He’d also find some promising trends, like the widespread dynamiting of the highrise housing projects of the 1960s and 1970s in favor of a determination to start over, and the rise of many prosperous middle-class neighborhoods in minority areas of big cities. A forward thinker by nature, he might have thought of one of his favorite sayings, delivered among other places at the end of the triumphant march from Selma: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.”
