What We Have, What We’ve Lost, and What We Must Build.
By Eric Lawrence Frazier, MBA
The Fair Housing Act of 1968 was passed to stop the riots. That is the honest accounting of its origins. The bill had been stalled in Congress for two years. It moved in the week after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., as American cities burned for the second consecutive year. President Johnson signed it seven days after Dr. King was killed, on April 11, 1968. The people who voted for it and the president who signed it were responding to social pressure, not moral conviction. It was a concession. It was designed to appease.
And yet. It had an impact. The explicit forms of discrimination that were commonplace in 1968 — the posted signs, the written restrictive covenants, the openly stated refusals — have been substantially eliminated from legal practice. The law stopped the major crimes. It gave us just enough to continue our pursuit. It was not what it should have been. But it was not nothing.
The Real Story Is Not the Gap
The racial homeownership gap is wider today than it was in 1968. Black homeownership stands at 44.7 percent. White homeownership stands at 73.8 percent. The gap has widened by approximately five percentage points in fifty-eight years. That is the failure. That is the evidence of what the law left undone.
But that is not the whole story. And it is not the most important story.
The real story is that we are here. Full participants. We cannot be denied our seat at the table of American prosperity. We cannot be excluded from the pursuit of the American dream of homeownership and freedom. We will have our share of what this country promises for everyone. That claim — that insistence — is the story. Not the gap.
This is not a perfect union. Someone might argue it is not even a union. But we are the melting pot. We are part of this country’s history, its culture, its economy, and its future. And it has been the rule of law — imperfect, contested, never fully delivered, but present — that has kept us engaged in the process rather than outside of it. Not the goodwill of the men who govern. Not their moral evolution. The rule of law. That is what we have and what we defend.
This Too Shall Pass
The current administration has mounted the most comprehensive rollback of fair housing enforcement since the Act’s passage. Zero charges filed. One hundred and fifteen cases closed. HUD’s enforcement staff cut by half. The disparate impact doctrine targeted for elimination. The Equal Access Rule halted. Guidance to state agencies threatening to cut off funding unless they stop enforcing their own laws.
This too shall pass.
Administrations come and go. Laws come and go. Every protection we have ever been given has been contested, reduced, or reversed at some point in the cycle. And every time, we are still here when the cycle turns. We were here before this administration. We will be here after it. The law outlasts the lawmaker. The Constitution outlasts the president. And the people whose determination produced the law outlast all of it.
What the Ancestors Built Without Any Law
The Fair Housing Act could be abolished tomorrow. If it were, it would not stop us. It would not stop us because it did not create us. We were building before it existed.
Our ancestors built cities. They built businesses. They bought land. They built farms. They invented. They created institutions of learning and commerce and culture. They did all of this without the protection of a fair housing law, without the protection of any law, without the protection of a government that recognized their humanity. They built under conditions of legal slavery, legal segregation, legal exclusion, and systematic violence. They built anyway.
That is the legacy I carry. Not the law. The determination that produced the law, that existed before the law, and that will continue after the law regardless of what any administration does to it. The spirit of our ancestors is not contained in a statute. It is in us. It has always been in us.
Grateful for the Law. More Grateful for the Legacy.
I am grateful for the Fair Housing Act. I am grateful for every case it won, every family it protected, every discriminator it held accountable, every settlement it produced. I am grateful for the legal infrastructure that, at its best, gave individual buyers a remedy and put institutions on notice that their practices had consequences. That mattered. That still matters. We should fight to preserve and strengthen it.
But I am more grateful for the legacy. The legacy of a people who refused to accept that circumstances determined outcomes. Who refused to let the verdict of the system become the verdict on their lives. Who found a way around every wall, through every barrier, in spite of every policy designed to hold them back.
That is what this six-year series has been about. Not just the law. The people. The families who sat across the table from me — and later on the other side of a Zoom screen — who came with a goal and a determination and asked me to help them get there. The buyers who pooled resources with their families to get into markets that priced them out individually. The families who held through down markets and came out with equity. The first-generation buyers who built the foundation no one had built before them, so that the next generation would have a starting point.
I am determined to live my best life in these United States of America. That determination does not come from the Fair Housing Act. It comes from thirty-five years of watching what people can build when they decide to build it. It comes from the ancestors. It comes from knowing that the power was never in the paper. It was always in the people.
The law can be attacked. The enforcement can be gutted. The protections can be reversed. But they cannot take the determination. They never could. They never will.
We are here to stay.
Poetry says the rest.
We Are Here to Stay
They passed it in the riot smoke to quiet what had burned.
A concession to the uprisings for justice we had earned.
No teeth, no real enforcement, but it stopped the major crimes.
And gave us just enough to keep on climbing through the times.
The gap is real and fifty-eight years later it remains.
But that is not the story — that is only part of the pains.
The real story is that we are here and we cannot be denied.
Full participants at the table with our history and our pride.
Administrations come and go and laws will rise and fall.
But we are here and we are staying and we answer every call.
The ancestors built without a law and so can we.
The power was never in the paper — it was always in me.
This is not a perfect union and it never really was.
But we are here because the rule of law is what it does.
Not the mind of men who govern us — their motives shift like sand.
But the Constitution and the law upon which we still stand.
Those laws are under pressure and the protections wearing thin.
The executive orders chip away at what we’ve always been.
But this too shall pass as every administration does.
The law outlasts the lawmaker — it always has and does.
Administrations come and go and laws will rise and fall.
But we are here and we are staying and we answer every call.
The ancestors built without a law and so can we.
The power was never in the paper — it was always in me.
They come and go and every cycle brings a different face.
Some lift us higher, some work hard to put us in our place.
But we are here when every single one of them is done.
We were here before they came and we’ll be here when they’re gone.
Abolish every fair housing law and what would happen then?
We would build the same way that our ancestors did again.
Without the law, without the government, without a single right.
They built and held and passed it down — and so we can tonight.
Administrations come and go and laws will rise and fall.
But we are here and we are staying and we answer every call.
The ancestors built without a law and so can we.
The power was never in the paper — it was always in me.
They built the cities, bought the farms, invented, grew, and led.
Without a law to protect them and with everything they dread.
They built the businesses and homes and held them through the storm.
Their spirit is our legacy — our standard and our norm.
I am grateful for the law and for the sixty years it gave.
For every case it won and every family that it saved.
But I am more grateful for the legacy my ancestor paved.
The determination to be excellent — that is the gift they gave.
Administrations come and go and laws will rise and fall.
But we are here and we are staying and we answer every call.
The ancestors built without a law and so can we.
The power was never in the paper — it was always in me.
They passed it just to quiet us and keep the peace in place.
But quiet turned to power and we claimed our rightful space.
The law was just the starting line — we always knew the score.
We were here before the law. We will be here long after.
Administrations come and go and laws will rise and fall.
But we are here and we are staying and we answer every call.
The ancestors built without a law and so can we.
The power was never in the paper — it was always in me.
So take the law or leave the law — we are not defined by it.
We are defined by what we build and how we never quit.
The power was never in the paper or the pen they used to sign.
The power was in us before the law and it is still in mine.
Administrations come and go and laws will rise and fall.
But we are here and we are staying and we answer every call.
The ancestors built without a law and so can we.
The power was never in the paper — it was always in me.
CONTINUE THE CONVERSATION
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References for this essay are available at thepowerisnow.com/fairhousing2026