The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the War on Poverty provided new tools for cities struggling with residential segregation; an aging, overcrowded housing stock; and the relocation of jobs to the suburbs. In the era of Black power, the purposes to which these tools would be put engendered especially fierce debates among residents and policymakers. Some seized new laws and policies to prioritize integration of poor Blacks into middle-class, predominantly white neighborhoods, arguing that eliminating residential segregation was the key to opening educational and economic opportunity. Critics of this dispersal model countered with plans for economic revitalization within Black neighborhoods, asserting that new legislative and judicial mandates should be enlisted in service of community economic development; this latter position reflected an emphasis in the Black power movement on leveraging grassroots mobilization and Black capital toward the revitalization of inner-city neighborhoods.

By the 1960s public housing construction and highly contested urban renewal had cleared some “slums” in major cities across the country, displacing low-income Black and Latino families and pushing them into other nonwhite neighborhoods. Meanwhile, newly built projects, concentrated in inner cities and the traditional Black belts, reinforced the racial boundaries of the ghetto. Residents of these neighborhoods confronted a deepening urban crisis as blue-collar jobs migrated out of the cities to the suburbs or the Sunbelt South. In Chicago, a city whose history exemplified the formation of what Arnold Hirsch calls the “second ghetto” and what Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton term “hyper-segregation,” the consequences of residential segregation were starkly evident to Black residents and activists. Increasingly frustrated, they organized to transform housing patterns across the city, ultimately merging more than fifty neighborhood associations to form the West Side Federation (WSF). In 1965, the federation urged Chicago officials, including Mayor Richard J. Daley and the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA), and the federal Public Housing Administration (PHA), the precursor to HUD, to desegregate the city’s public housing in accordance with the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed racial discrimination by any program receiving federal funds. This initial challenge ultimately led to a series of class action lawsuits, known as the Gautreaux cases, named for Dorothy Gautreaux, a community activist and resident of a South Side project. Residents, activists, and attorneys agreed housing was a problem, but they disagreed about the solution.