Snapshot: Come All Ye Faithful

It’s Christmas 1964; these kids are earmuffed and swaddled to go out caroling in Berkeley, then one of the anomalous integrated suburbs in hypersegregated St. Louis. It’s from the files of the Freedom of Residence Community, a short-lived fair-housing nonprofit. A year or so after this photo was shot, FRC filed a lawsuit on behalf of Joseph Lee and Barbara Jo Jones, a young couple trying to buy a house in Florissant’s Paddock Woods subdivision. The builder, Alfred H. Mayer,  refused their offer—because Lee was black. The couple appealed to the FRC for help; attorney Samuel Liberman argued the case up to the Supreme Court, which issued a landmark decision in 1968 that prevented builders and landlords from discriminating on the basis of race. Jones humbly remarked that she and her husband “were just two nobodies who wanted to buy a house.” But throughout history, it’s often been these small everyday acts—buying a house, singing carols, sitting down on the bus—that have lit the way to radical change.