Former Vice President Walter Mondale, who co-authored the 1968 Fair Housing Act and was a staunch civil rights supporter, passed away Monday, April 20, 2021, at age 93.
Jesse Van Tol, CEO of the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, made the following statement:
“Vice President Walter Mondale was a champion of civil rights, a co-author of the landmark Fair Housing Act passed in 1968 and a fierce advocate for its successful passage. The act protects people from discrimination when they are buying or renting a home and stands as one of the landmark civil rights laws of the 1960s.
“Passing just eight days after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the Fair Housing Act, and Vice President Mondale’s defining contribution to it laid out a vision of desegregated communities and an end to discrimination in housing that had shaped the American landscape and determined who lived where.
“While the generations of fair housing advocates that followed him continue the work to fully implement the Fair Housing Act, its promise remains unfulfilled. Communities and neighborhoods remain divided and the Black homeownership rate is barely changed from what it was in 1968. The nation’s overall wealth has grown, but so has the racial wealth divide.
“Even late in his life, during the Trump Administration, when segregation, discrimination and inequality still plagued the nation, he remained a champion for fair housing and for a vision of a better America.
“Walter Mondale should be remembered for his personal leadership and for the values he championed as we look to strengthen the Fair Housing Act and its enforcement and remove the barriers to fair housing and homeownership that persist to this day.”
