As the nation enters into its 37th federally observed Martin Luther King, Jr. Holiday Weekend, it’s important, and often uncomfortable, to remember that something becoming a law or a person having a federal holiday named for them doesn’t mean everybody suddenly becomes enlightened into knowing it’s a good idea. That goes both at the time of such historical change and even today. We know all that, yet we still try pretty hard as a society to generally forget. Some states today, e.g., Florida, are doing their best to institutionalize such forgetting.

I’ve been spending a few days exploring old newspapers to get a better handle on the chronology and major events in the story of Albuquerque housing discrimination (e.g., racial covenants) and how the legal and extralegal practices preventing people of color from living in many neighborhoods eventually, slowly ended. Many of us know that Albuquerque passed an anti-discrimination ordinance in 1952 pertaining to public accommodations, one of the first anywhere in the country. We also got around to passing a housing anti-discrimination ordinance in 1963.

But while some of the stories surrounding development and passage of those ordinances are fairly well-known, that knowledge of history tends to stop with passage of legislation, leaving out two important questions: 1. How and how well was the legislation enforced? 2. What about the people who didn’t support the legislation/enforcement at the time?

Getting anywhere near to thorough answers to those questions is gonna take more than one blogpost. There’s also the extremely apparent, yet strangely undiagnosed ADHD of your humble blogposter and the flighty nature of blogs/internet/life in 2024 itself. Nevertheless, I’m gonna try hard to stick to the subject of those two questions and very much appreciate anyone out there who comes along for the ride.

As brief initial look at a subject begun in its mid-20th Century manifestation by the end of World War II, we’re gonna start by chronologically vaulting all the way to a November 16, 1967 story on page A-2 of the Albuquerque Tribune.

Coming out of the historical blue and with no context, your first question concerning this story might be: “This shit was still going on in 1967? I thought you just wrote that we fixed housing discrimination in Albuquerque back in 1963.” Uh…not exactly. Others out there might cynically point out that a story at least somewhat like this this could be written today, as housing discrimination still exists. Take out the address of the litigants (newspapers don’t do that these days) and antiquated/racist term “negro” and it’s not unthinkable that there might be one/some ABQ apartment owners doing pretty much today what Mrs. Myrene McCollum was doing (allegedly) back in 1967 at her Queens Point Manor Apartments at 3304 Morris N.E.

Because what was Mrs. McCollum doing and what was a “housing discrimination charge” in 1967 and why did her attorney argue eliminating housing discrimination was unconstitutional and what did “being cleared” mean, and what all happened between passage of the 1963 ordinance and November 1967 leading to this event/story?

The questions sure do multiply. Going back to the blog/ADHD/life in 2024 thing, maybe it’s best to just leave those questions, and the two overriding ones (remember those?) serving as conceptual framework for this here thing, hanging a bit. Otherwise this post is gonna pass 10,000 words faster than my mind changes the subject.

In other words, more to come…