Mount Laurels’ racist past goes beyond viral rants to become discriminatory housing

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Mount Laurel recently made headlines as a video of a white man verbally assaulting his African-American neighbors went viral, followed a few weeks later by another clip, this time of a Mount Laurel woman who a hotel employee called the N word and was accused of bias. bullying, New Jersey’s version of a hate crime.

Sadly, these stories are all too familiar and put this historic community back at the center of the conversation about the intersection of race and housing.

Mount Laurel has had a large black community for over 200 years and played a key role in the Underground Railroad. But with this story, there have been repeated efforts to bring this community out. Fifty years ago, a group of Mount Laurel residents, led by civil rights leader Ethel Lawrence in partnership with the South Burlington and Camden County NAACPs, sued Mount Laurel when the city shut down the attempts. construction of garden apartments for low-income families.

READ MORE: How a racist rant in Mount Laurel prompted neighbors to fight back and a community to push for change

The New Jersey Supreme Court, in Mount Laurel I & II, has ruled that city land use bylaws that prevent affordable housing opportunities for the poor are unconstitutional. The Mount Laurel Doctrine, as it is now called, is one of the most important civil rights cases of our time; our two organizations have worked for decades to implement it.

Housing has long been at the epicenter of racial issues within this country: redlining, voting, redistribution, the racial wealth gap, the war on drugs, education, the environment, etc. A person’s zip code is directly related to their ability to lead a healthy and successful life.

As our nation continues to fight race and justice, housing justice must be high on the list.

The historic Fair Housing Act signed on April 11, 1968 over 50 years ago was the cornerstone of an era of social change led by Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. and others to save the soul of our nation, and it took King’s tragic murder to finally get it through.

The video, particularly of the July 2 incident in Mount Laurel, paints an unfortunate truth: While the Fair Housing Act limited the most impure racial discrimination, the racism endemic in housing remains. This kind of harassment is just the tip of a larger system that still separates black families into different housing markets from white families.

Too often, cities like Mount Laurel prevent and still restrict the development of modest starting homes and apartments in a way that hits black families the hardest because of America’s yawning racial wealth gap. According to our research, New Jersey has created more than 70,000 affordable housing units in historically excluded communities following the Mount Laurel cases. But exclusion remains pervasive, especially in the coastal suburbs, a recently recognized national problem everywhere from the Bay Area to Long Island.

READ MORE: Black South Jersey man says he was attacked by white security guard with dog at Adelphia restaurant

Evictions and foreclosures linked to the COVID-19 crisis also threaten to hit black families harder, disproportionately affected this year due to housing and health inequalities exacerbated by environmental racism. While New Jersey recently passed a law retroactively banning evictions for non-payment of rent during the crisis, virtually everywhere else thousands of black families will face homelessness now that the CDC’s eviction ban has ended.

Homeowners have developed new screening tools that import racial disparities from the criminal justice system and the racial wealth gap in the housing market. But in June, we were with Governor Phil Murphy when he enacted the Fair Chance in Housing Act in New Jersey. The first of its kind statewide, the law prevents homeowners from discriminating against applicants on the basis of their criminal record after serving their sentence. It serves as a national model.

The work of 1968 continues, especially in northern states like New Jersey, which often have similar or even more widespread racial disparities, especially in housing, than the South.

Race and housing will forever be intertwined. Tackling one without the other will never achieve the desired result. But still, there is hope in the strong community resistance against the vile remarks in Mount Laurel a few weeks ago, in the tens of thousands of homes created through similar community mobilization decades ago, and in new policies like the Fair Chance in Housing Act. . We must now re-engage in this work. Housing justice is racial justice.

Adam Gordon is executive director of the Fair Share Housing Center, a statewide affordable housing advocacy organization. Marcus Sibley is president of the Southern Burlington County NAACP and chair for environmental and climate justice of the New Jersey State Conference of the NAACP.

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