Alumnae Profile

Nancy B. Kenyon ’56

For all of us who see a wrong committed and fail to act, Nancy B. Kenyon ’56 represents our better selves. In the early 1960s Nancy, who is white, was looking to buy a house in suburban New Jersey. African-American friends were doing the same thing in the same town but receiving very different treatment.

“This was before there were any fair-housing laws,” says Nancy, now executive director of Fair Housing of Marin in California, when members of minority groups—including her friends—were routinely locked out of neighborhoods by blatantly racist realtors and residents. “I really had no idea of the extent of discrimination until we got into that situation,” she recalls. She decided to do something about it.

Nancy went to work for the Fair Housing Council of Northern New Jersey, which used a creative blend of moral persuasion and humiliation to shame people into doing the right thing. She ultimately becoming housing director and in 1979 took her skills west to work on the housing discrimination piece of a school desegregation lawsuit for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in San Francisco. Since 1984, she has directed the Marin County organization that investigates complaints of discrimination locally.

While outright discrimination is rare these days and federal laws protect lots of people previously shunned-racial minorities, people with disabilities, and families with children, for example—the practice has gone underground, says Nancy. So groups like hers use “testers,” who pose as home or apartment seekers, to gather evidence of mistreatment. Simultaneously, Fair Housing of Marin conducts entertaining school programs to “unteach” learned prejudices.

Nancy recently was recognized by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development for her work in the area of senior housing discrimination. She designed and conducted an audit of residential care facilities in her jurisdiction that turned up evidence of differential treatment favoring white testers in sixty percent of the sites targeted. Housing groups around the country are replicating her survey model.

After years of fighting the good fight, Nancy would not be criticized for thinking about retirement. But she has no plans to quit. An ardent feminist who supports flextime and part-time job opportunities, she works three days a week. “Caring people are needed desperately to end segregation in neighborhoods,” she says to young people looking for meaningful work. “The issue of racism is still America’s greatest problem and tragedy.”

Be fierce in your instincts in the midst of being open. — Terry Tempest Williams, author and naturalist, speaking at MHC, November 3, 2000