by Steve Dougherty

Six days after Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in Memphis on April 4, 1968,  President Lyndon Johnson signed the Fair Housing Act and dedicated it to King.  It was the third piece of landmark civil rights legislation passed by the U.S. Congress and signed by Johnson to realize the dream King had worked and died for.

Earlier, on the heels of another assassination, Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 , first proposed by his murdered predecessor, John F. Kennedy.  A bipartisan Congress passed the bill that  outlawed discrimination based on race,  color, religion, sex or national origin.

The next year, in the wake of the beating of peaceful Civil Rights marchers in Selma, Alabama, Congress passed and Johnson signed the 1965 Voting Rights Act.  Among other things it made illegal the humiliating so-called literacy tests that barred blacks from exercising their rights for failing to answer impossible questions like: “How many bubbles in a bar of soap?”

Sixty years later, President Donald J. Trump pulled the plug on the enforcement of civil rights laws.  He ordered the Department of Justice Civil Rights Division, tasked with enforcing laws prohibiting discrimination in housing, civil rights, disability and immigrant rights, as well as voting and election laws passed by Congress, to stop all investigations.

It is worth noting that Trump’s  family-owned real estate  company was sued by Republican President Richard Nixon’s Department of Justice in the early 1970s for flagrant violations of the Fair Housing Act.

Trump also ordered the Department of Housing and Urban Development to slash funding to private non-profits that fielded as many as 34,000 complaints of Fair Housing Act violations every year.

And so what a bullet failed to do 57 years ago today, kill Martin Luther King’s dream of a better America that upholds the rights of all, the Trump administration seems to be accomplishing.