After a multi-year battle among the Beaumont Housing Authority, housing advocates, the Department of Housing and Development (HUD), and the Texas General Land Office, the city of Beaumont said it would rather give up the funding than build homes for these people in a richer and whiter part of town. HUD is now assigning the money to other communities and Beaumont has to find its own money to renovate Concord Homes, if it chooses to do so.

The Fair Housing Act became law in 1968, a week after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. Its goal was to prevent landlords and lenders from turning away tenants and homebuyers because of their color, but Senator Edward Brooke, one of the sponsors of the bill (and the first black man elected to the U.S. Senate), had bigger ideas. He wanted to use the law to integrate cities and suburbs, reversing the effects of decades of housing discrimination, discrimination that had often been perpetuated by the federal government.

“American cities suffer from galloping segregation, a malady so widespread and so deeply embedded in the national psyche that many Americans, Negroes as well as whites, have to come to regard it as a national condition,” Brooke said in 1968. “The prime carrier of galloping segregation has been the Federal Government. First it built the ghettos, then it locked the gates, now it appears to be fumbling for the key.”

But America could do better, Brooke believed. Federal laws could make it possible for black residents living in inner cities to move to areas with better schools, decent homes and good jobs, simply by making it illegal to refuse qualified tenants on the basis of race. HUD could give money to cities and states to build public housing in areas outside of “Watts, Hough, Hunter’s Point and ten-thousand other ghettos across the land.” The federal government could withhold funding from cities dead-set against integration, and make sure its money went to help build a country where blacks and whites live together, side by side.

“This measure, as we have said so often before, will not tear down the ghetto,” he said. “It will merely unlock the door for those who are able and choose to leave.”

In many places, America seems to have given up on that vision. Affluent neighborhoods throughout the country resist the construction of affordable housing in their backyards. White residents self-segregate, and though poverty might not be limited to urban areas, it is often the most concentrated where minorities live. In places such as Beaumont, federal funding to build homes for black residents in white areas is lost because neither white nor black residents want that to happen.

“This town is caught in the 1950s,” Janice Brassard, a former school-board member, told me.