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city and moving to suburban neighborhoods. In a 2006 study, the NFHA contends that
real-estate firms routinely use techniques that are illegal under fair housing laws to steer
black applicants away from predominantly white neighborhoods, and to steer whites away
from neighborhoods in which there is a substantial African American presence. Several
studies that have made use of civil rights testers have also concluded that housing
discrimination is commonplace.21
At the same time, a study by the Brookings Institution concludes that the minority
presence in America’s traditionally white suburbs rose by substantial numbers during the
1990s. The study showed that in 2000, 27 percent of major suburban populations
belonged to minority groups, up from 19 percent in 1990. The study showed that about
half of Hispanics and 39 percent of blacks lived in the suburbs.22

Affirmative Action

When the 1964 Civil Rights Act was enacted, most Americans were confident that major
gains toward racial equality would automatically follow the dismantling of legal
segregation. Indeed, major gains in employment, poverty reduction, and education were
attained during the 1960s. Under conditions of near full employment, hundreds of
thousands of black workers found jobs in the booming industrial sector. At the same time,
universities made special efforts to enroll greater numbers of blacks and also provided
financial assistance for minority students.

But this progress was accompanied by a series of developments that suggested that
achieving racial equality would be a more complex and longer-term challenge than
Americans had initially imagined. There was, to begin with, the discovery that racial
prejudice and inequality were not limited to the South. Throughout the rest of the country,
blacks faced many of the problems associated with legal segregation: job discrimination,
inferior educational opportunities, and, especially, exclusion from white neighborhoods.
Efforts to address these problems through demonstrations and civil disobedience—tactics
that had proven effective in bringing down legal discrimination in the South—were
ineffective in the other regions.

Another sign of the complexity of America’s racial dynamic was the increase in single-
parent families. This phenomenon was initially pointed out by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, at
the time a domestic policy adviser in the administration of President Lyndon Johnson. The
report in which Moynihan discussed the growth in female-headed families was bitterly
attacked by black and white academics, and Moynihan was accused of “blaming the victim”
in his paper. In fact, the problem that he identified became much more pronounced in
subsequent years, with serious consequences for American race relations. Meanwhile, the
reaction to Moynihan’s findings was a disturbing sign of the difficulties impeding a frank
discussion about the most effective strategies for achieving racial equality.

The combination of urban disorder, the problems faced by the black poor, and the
realization that the elimination of legal barriers to equality would have a limited impact on
the overall status of black Americans led policymakers and some academics to advocate a

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