Just a week after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination in 1968, Congress passed the Fair Housing Act with broad bipartisan support.

The law has helped the country make great strides by combating policies that discriminate against families, the poor, African-Americans, Latinos, other communities of color and people with disabilities.

It also has been instrumental in eliminating policies like racially exclusive zoning rules, subsidies for segregated communities and redlining, all of which perpetuated racial segregation, stripped individual African-Americans of their right to choose where to live, and relegated entire communities to ghettos of inferior opportunity.

While the Fair Housing Act has been suc- cessful, it still has more work to do because the legacy of these discriminatory policies persists in many areas.

Yet in the same week that we celebrate Dr. King’s life, the U.S. Supreme Court threatens to upend a key provision of the act, and with it a crucial tool for eradicating residential segregation. Arguments in the case, Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs v. Inclusive

Communities Project, were heard by the high court Wednesday, Jan. 21.

At stake is a legal protection that ensures banks, landlords and others use policies that apply fairly to everyone. The protection also prevents mortgage lenders, for example, from adopting policies that seem neutral in theory, but unfairly exclude or segregate particular communities in practice.

The outcome in this case will determine whether the act can continue to be used, as it has for decades, as a tool to replace discrimina- tory policies with ones that roll back the tide of residential segregation.

This is a unique time when the nation’s eyes have been refocused on the racial dynamics that undergird our society. Let us seize the moment and celebrate the vision and endeavors of Dr. King — and hope that the U.S. Supreme Court will do the same by allowing his work to con- tinue through the Fair Housing Act.

SHERRILYN IFILL New York City

The writer is president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund