After World War II, African Americans faced sharp limits on housing. The demands for housing in Chicago grew while African American veterans and families had to contend with being restricted to a “Black Belt” along 12th and 79 streets and Wentworth and Cottage Grove. As African Americans increasingly moved North from the South in search of jobs, white communities began to implement policies such as restrictive covenants to keep their communities white only. Restrictive covenants are contractual agreements between groups of property owners that do not allow for the purchase or lease of their properties to certain demographics. In this case they would be racial restrictive covenants, which do not allow the purchasing by or leasing to African Americans. Public housing projects were federally funded, yet they were segregated to be in compliance with “The Neighborhood Composition Rule," an addition to housing policy brought about during the New Deal that required housing developments to be placed in neighborhoods of the same race as the residents of the development. Although by 1948 the Supreme Court had outlawed restrictive covenants, with an increase in housing due to "white flight", a phenomenon that occurred when whites fled from neighborhoods after African Americans moved in, speculators implemented and promoted a new system of “red-lining” in order to segregate neighborhoods and deny housing to Black Americans. In this process, the New Deal’s Home Owners’ Loan Corporation categorized areas of major American cities according to lending risks. Black and poor neighborhoods were nearly always poorly rated. 

By the 1950s, however, legal challenges to such practices –and new laws –helped create new tools to challenge these housing practices. In 1954, the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education called for the ending of segregation and the subsequent integration of all public schools in the vague timeline of: “with all deliberate speed." Although this decision signaled a changing legal landscape, Black and white Americans alike realized that Brown v. Board would not yet change the lives of America’s citizens in any meaningful or impactful way. During the mid-1950s, the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) fought segregation in Chicago's public schools in the face of the Chicago Board of Education and Mayor Daley, who vowed to keep the city as white as possible.

By 1960, only 1.5 percent of African Americans lived in neighborhoods with less than a 10 percent Black population. The problem was further exacerbated through discrimination in public housing. The Chicago Housing Authority, which was in charge of these public housing projects, was accused of “perpetuating racial segregation by siting projects in the ghetto.” To remedy the inaction and hesitancy of various government bodies to enforce desegregation and integration, President John F. Kennedy proposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The Act worked to end segregation and discrimination in a number of different areas, such as “workplaces, courts, polls, government agencies, municipal facilities, schools, and public accommodations such as restaurants, motels, and transportation.” Essentially, where the Brown v. Board of Education decision had lacked the "bite" to accomplish these goals, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 “added teeth." The Act, through Title VI, allowed the federal government to pull funding from school districts if they continued their discriminatory practices, fostering real integration beyond “tokenism." 

Yet how did this new federal law affect Chicago housing? In November of 1965, Hal Baron sought to clarify this question. Baron was born in 1930 to a Jewish family in Saint Louis, Missouri. His parents were New Deal Democrats. Even before he embarked on a long career in activism, which began at Amherst College and continued in graduate school at the University of Chicago, Hal Baron questioned many common views held by whites about African Americans. Although Baron himself was white, through his work in the Black community, his views matured into an appreciation of African Americans as the fundamental arbiters of the contradiction that lay at the core of American democracy, namely, its roots in Black slavery. Hal Baron started his activist career in 1948 when his college expelled a fraternity for pledging a Black student. This initial induction into the power of social movements would lead Baron to join more activist groups in the future, where he would meet his future wife as well. In 1962, he served a researcher for the Urban League. In building upon the essential work of contemporary and past Black activists, such as Paul Robeson, his research proved indispensable for the organization. Even Martin Luther King Jr would use his work in tackling discrimination within Chicago. Still, Baron was less comfortable in the public eye than his more socially well-known influences. For instance, Frank L. Bixby, an Honorary Life Director of the Chicago Urban League, noted that although "Hal wasn't one of those people quoted in the papers all the time[...]he was the guy behind the scenes, gathering the research and doing the hard work that made an impact on thousands of lives."

The Urban League –the organization Hal Baron worked with –emerged during World War I and is generally considered one of the more conservative factions of the Civil Rights Movement at the time. The Urban League promoted social work policies that sought to open jobs for Black Americans, yet critics viewed it as somewhat beholden the white status quo. However, according to Arvarh E. Strickland, after 1956 the Urban League became more active, under the leadership of Edwin C. ("Bill") Berry in 1956, the Chicago Urban League improved significantly. Despite the National Urban League suffering financial difficulty, the Chicago Urban League emerged by the 1960s as one of the best positioned Urban Leagues in the country.

Hal Baron’s memo encouraged the Urban League to file a lawsuit leading to the pivotal court case Gautreaux v. Chicago Housing Authority. In his memo, Baron made the case to Berry, the head of the Chicago Urban League, that in order to combat the housing and education issues plaguing Chicago, not only must government administrators actively address these issues, but that Congress had to also address these issues by strengthening the Civil Rights Act itself. The Gautreaux v. Chicago Housing Authority decision would see a decisive blow dealt to the Daley Administration and a great victory for the plan organized by Hal Baron and the Chicago Urban League. The court would find, on February 10, 1969, the Chicago Housing Authority guilty of having “intentionally chosen sites for family public housing with the purpose of maintaining residential separation of the races in Chicago." The judge presiding over the case, Richard Austin, ruled that future public housing must be in the form of low rise buildings scattered in white neighborhoods and that the next 700 units of public housing, plus 75 percent of public housing construction thereafter, be built in white neighborhoods. 

After this victory for the Civil Rights Movement in Chicago, Baron continued to serve as an advisor to the Chicago Urban League and became the Chief Policy Advisor to Mayor Harold Washington in the 1980s, where he played a pivotal role in the campaign and administration. Baron would notably fight for education reform to improve Chicago Public schools. Baron passed away in 2017 at the age of 86, but his legacy remains imprinted on the Chicago Urban League, which continues its work by emphasizing "the need for Black citizens to ‘prepare’ for the opportunities wrested from business and political officials."

Many other activists, such as Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., used Title VI of the Civil Rights Act to attack Chicago’s segregation in public housing and public schooling, as Hal Baron does in his memorandum. In fact, because of the vast extent of the unfair and segregated housing in the city, Chicago was at the center of a national discourse about concerning civil rights for African Americans. For example, in January of 1966, Martin Luther King Jr., alongside the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, led the famous Chicago Freedom Movement, in which King and his family moved to a small home in Chicago to both be closer to the movement and to highlight the discriminatory living options available to African Americans. Though these activist movements were effective in many ways, Chicago remains one of the most segregated cities in America. Wealth is tied closely to homeownership in America, and the housing discrimination that prevented African Americans from purchasing property when it was most available in the 1960s still shapes economic inequalities today. More work must be done to end discrimination in Chicago and to continue the work of Hal Baron and the activists of the '60s.