The following piece, written before the decision was handed down, explains how the case came to be, and what was at stake.

A week after Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in 1968, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Fair Housing Act into law. Its goal was to prevent housing discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin, and it gave the Department of Housing and Urban Development the legal tools to try and remedy decades of housing segregation.

This month the Supreme Court will decide whether to scrap parts of that law. Housing advocates from across the country wait, nervous, every Monday (and sometimes Thursday) when the court releases opinions. The case, Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs v. The Inclusive Communities Project, colloquially known as Inclusive Communities, has many of these advocates worried that a court that has rolled back many protections of the civil rights era will go even further this time.

“This case is a core civil rights issue, and it's the court’s only really race case this term,” said Janai Nelson, the associate director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, in a conference call with reporters last month. “It comes at a time when race and the consequences of policies and laws that have direct racial implications are unfolding in very disturbing ways on our many screens and with distressing regularity.”

The case came about when the Inclusive Communities Project, a Dallas non-profit that tries to promote racial and socioeconomic integration, sued the Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs in 2008 over the way the department allocated housing tax credits. HUD’s Low-Income-Housing Tax Credit, which is distributed by states, enables developers to build affordable housing without losing money. In Texas and other states, the state housing agency chooses which projects will receive the credits through a formula called the Qualified Allocation Plan (QAP), which gives some projects more points than others. States publish their QAPs every year, and some give priority to projects that are located in high-opportunity areas, others seek projects that invest in distressed neighborhoods, while others prioritize projects that target extremely low-income individuals. The projects with the most points receive the tax credits, and are thus able to move forward.

The Inclusive Communities Project argues that the way Texas distributed the points in Dallas between 1995 and 2009 led minorities to be segregated in poor areas of Dallas. That’s because, Inclusive Communities argues, in 1994 Texas stopped prioritizing the goal of desegregation when it chose which projects received tax credits. Between 1995 and 2009, the state did not award tax credits for any family units in predominantly white census tracts, and instead gave tax credits to locations “marked by the same ghetto conditions that the FHA was passed to remedy,” the lawsuit states.