Suchergebnisse

The California Legislature did not attempt to prevent property owners from selecting buyers or tenants on the basis of racial considerations until 1959. Then, by enacting the Hawkins Act and the Unruh Civil Rights Act, the legislature chose to regulate racial discrimination in all business establishments including those involving the selling or renting of residential property and in all publicly assisted housing. Three years later, by enacting the Rumford Fair Housing Act, the legislature extended the regulation of discriminatory conduct to owners of most, but not all, residential property. Plaintiffs alleged that, contrary to the express provisions of the Unruh Act, defendants refused to rent available apartment units to them solely because plaintiffs were Negroes. Defendants' motion for judgment was made and granted on the ground that Proposition 14 nullified the Unruh Act. On appeal, the California Supreme Court reversed and held the adoption of Proposition 14 constituted significant state involvement in racial discrimination as prohibited by the equal protection clause of the fourteenth amendment. Mulkey v. Reitman, 50 Cal. Rep. 881,413 P.2d 825 (1966).

The question of to what degree fear of punishment has been effective in eradicating racial discrimination is explored in a study of (a) the broad effect of anti-discrimination legislation, which is found to have been considerable, & (b) the recentness of US efforts toward integration. It is observed that a pro-integration public policy is hardly more than a generation old anywhere in the US. Under this light, the record since then seems one of genuine achievement, esp in those areas of human conduct which anti-discrimination laws can directly reach. It is concluded that enforcement of legal equality is a precondition to the attainment of pol'al & econ equality but that anti-discrimination laws alone cannot do the whole job. Such programs as the US anti-poverty campaign & the rent supplement'program are needed, but these programs have faltered in their execution & will probably be largely abandoned. Once established & rooted in the econ & soc mores of a community, segregation is difficult & costly to eradicate. M. Maxfield.