Jacob Kipp, left, and Robert Suderman look at materials at a Saturday presentation at the Carnegie Building marking the 50th anniversary of the Lawrence City Commission's passage of a fair housing ordinance. The program was a collaboration of the city and the Watkins Museum of History and one of a series planned to commemorate the anniversary.

When Jesse Milan, a black teacher in Lawrence schools, was looking for a home to buy in Lawrence in the 1960s, he was shown a house with a dirt floor.

At a program Saturday at the Carnegie Building commemorating the 50th anniversary of Lawrence City Commission adopting a fair housing ordinance, it was related that the house Milan was shown was almost certainly in one of the areas in which people of color seeking to buy or rent were steered. Those areas included the city’s then-extreme eastern and western sides, the Pinckney neighborhood and North Lawrence.

During his presentation, Rusty Monholland, the author of “This is American?: The Sixties in Lawrence, Kansas,” who earned his master’s and doctorate degrees in history from the University of Kansas, said many in Lawrence used the more virulent segregation in the South to diminish the widespread exclusion of blacks from businesses and the housing market in the city.

As the 1960s wore on, discriminatory housing practices were increasingly on the defensive. Monholland said more than 50 other cities nationally passed fair housing ordinances forbidding discriminatory tactics by 1967, and President John F. Kennedy signed an executive order in 1962 banning discrimination in federal housing. In Lawrence, the local chapters of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and Congress for Racial Equality started advocating for a local fair housing ordinance and gained the support from many churches and groups such as the League of Women Voters and the 800-member strong Lawrence League for the Promotion of Democracy.

During that time, there was opposition to fair housing measures at all levels of government from foes expressing defense of property rights, concern of the growth of government and fear that government was attempting to overturn the racial status quo. Some opponents were clearly — if perhaps unaware — racists, Monholland said, citing a letter a local woman wrote to former Kansas Sen. James Pearson claiming fair housing legislation would force her to sell her property to blacks.

“What is that Communism?” she wrote. “We are not forced to associate with undesirable whites, but with negroes that’s different.”

The Lawrence real estate industry remained opposed throughout the local debate, Monholland said. The arguments were the familiar ones that such legislation was an unwarranted government intrusion on the free market, violated the contract rights of property owners and that selling or renting to blacks would bring down property values, he said.

Those views were also expressed in Lawrence Journal-World opinion pieces, although the paper also ran a series of influential articles authored by defenders of the local fair housing ordinance in February and March 1967, Monholland said. Those articles were published as the Lawrence City Commission started consideration of the fair housing ordinance it would ultimately approve by a 4-1 vote on July 18, 1967.

As the only lawyer on the city’s Human Resource Commission created in response to an act of discrimination, Fred Six wrote the local fair housing ordinance early in a legal career that would eventually lead to a seat on the Kansas Supreme Court. Six recalled Saturday that KU law professor Robert Casad provided research on similar municipal measures, with one from Iowa City, Iowa, being the most influential of the Lawrence ordinance.

The City Commission allowed public comment on the measure at two meetings before its passage, said Tom Arnold, a retired KU adjunct professor who completed an oral history on the city’s fair housing ordinance for the city and the Watkins Museum of History. One was reserved for those in favor and the other for those in opposition. The pro meeting attracted a large number of speakers, while the opposition meeting drew only the attorney for the Lawrence Board of Realtors and a real estate agent, he said.

Dick Raney, who was mayor when the fair housing ordinance was adopted, said the work of supporters before the ordinance’s adoption was critical to its success.

“The City Commission job was made so easy because of community support,” he said.

Support was not without risks, Arnold said. Raney faced threats of a boycott of his business, and Six dealt with the same threat to his young law practice, he said. Milan, who became president of the local NAACP, faced more direct threats.

“Jesse Milan’s life was threatened and his house was firebombed,” Arnold said. “We can’t forget people were putting their live on the line.”