Could a 54-year-old civil rights law be revived?

Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination on April 4, 1968, helped usher in the passage of the Fair Housing Act (FHA), a law that promised to not only stop unjust discrimination but also reverse decades of government-created segregation.

The FHA, which made discrimination on the basis of race, color, national origin, religion, sex, familial status, and disability illegal in the process of buying and selling homes, had already failed to pass Congress in two earlier versions. As Michelle Adams wrote for the New Yorker, the 1968 version would likely have met the...