On this date -- April 11 -- in 1968, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed into law the Civil Rights Act of 1968. Known as the "Fair Housing Act," the law provided for equal housing opportunities regardless of race, religion, or national origin.
What does this have to do with Jack Kerouac? I find a June 4, 1968 letter from Kerouac to Ginsberg in which he says:
I never was arrested in my life till the civil rights movement made the cops jittery and paranoid of everybody they see on the sidewalk. (Selected Letters 1957 -1969, Penguin, 1999, p. 513)This, of course, is older, cynical, bitter Jack talking, not the young Jack who hung out with the disenfranchised and espoused compassion for all. I like to think that that Jack would have applauded equal opportunity in housing, given his compassion for others and the struggles his own ancestors faced in this country re: discrimination.
I note that on the date this law was enacted, Jack wrote a letter (unmailed) to editor Ellis Amburn. Signed Ti Jean and outlining a proposed manuscript, Jack said:
. . . and mindful too, be ye, that envy rules, but fate judges. (Ibid, p. 510)
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