Why We Do It

Our civil rights work focuses on racially segregated, government-funded, unequal housing and neighborhood conditions.

We do this work because the markers of successful representation are often visible and frequently capable of being counted. Some of those markers in cases brought by our firm are:

  • a court order requiring the use of medically appropriate blood lead level tests for children in the Medicaid program; 

  • Blacks and Hispanics elected as city council members, county commissioners, and school board members;

  • new assisted housing projects built in better neighborhood conditions and in locations from which affordable housing had long been excluded;

  • $13,000,000 in state funding for improved municipal services in public housing neighborhoods that had long been the victims of local government’s deliberate refusals to provide equal services;

  • an illegal landfill converted into the Trinity River Audubon Center, a flagship environmental education center on 120-acre haven for a vast array of birds and other wildlife in the increasingly urbanized Dallas, Texas metropolitan area. Five miles of trails lead visitors through hardwood forests, pond, wetland, and prairie ecosystems, and along the Trinity River;

  • 9,900 new voucher and public housing units made available to Walker class members;

  • Over 3000 voucher families moved into high opportunity areas with mobility counseling and financial assistance support in Walker v. HUD, et al;

  • approximately 100 families, owner-occupants and tenants, provided with voluntary relocation funding if they chose to move out of a flood prone, lead contaminated, industrial concentrated, deliberately segregated neighborhood;

  • an award of $900,000 per year for a legal services program to provide housing mobility services to class members in a public housing desegregation case,

  • 580 demolition liens released and any costs collected returned to property owners whose vacant single family homes were demolished by the City without due process,

    James v. City of Dallas, 2003 WL 22342799, at *9 (N.D. Tex. 2003), aff'd sub nom. James v. City of Dallas Tex., 115 Fed. Appx. 205 (5th Cir. 2004) (unpublished).

  • dirt streets paved and sidewalks and street drainage provided in historically Black and Hispanic neighborhoods that had long been subject to unequal treatment;

  • voucher rents set by zip codes for voucher holders in the Dallas metropolitan area to allow access to housing in opportunity neighborhoods

  • vacant and uninhabitable assisted housing projects replaced by new projects with updated infrastructure. 

Daniel & Beshara P.C.’s cases work to remedy the deeply imbedded inequities existing in the government created Black and Hispanic neighborhoods. Often these neighborhoods continue to have unequal conditions and a severe lack of resources that affect the lives of Black and Hispanic families and children. Our practice also focuses on the governmental barriers excluding non-Whites from housing opportunities in predominantly White neighborhoods with adequate resources.

In the late 1960s, Senator Walter Mondale (Democrat) and Senator Edward Brooke (Republican) worked together towards the passage of the nation’s Fair Housing Act. The legislation they drafted was adopted by Congress a week after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. During the legislative hearings on a Fair Housing Rights bill in 1968, Senator Edward Brooke explained that “our Government, unfortunately, has been sanctioning discrimination in housing throughout this Nation.” He stated:

We make two assertions: (1) that American cities and suburbs suffer from galloping segregation, a malady so widespread and so deeply imbedded in the national psyche that many Americans, ...have come to regard it as a natural condition; and (2) that the prime carrier of galloping segregation has been the Federal Government. First it built the ghettos; then it locked the gates; now it appears to be fumbling for the key.... Nearly everything the Government touches turns to segregation, and the Government touches nearly everything....

Senator Brooke explained to Congress in 1968 that change for the institution of government sanctioned discrimination had been intolerably slow.

“But in the critical areas of housing, education, and employment, change has been intolerably slow. It is in these realms that one finds the basic explanation for the malaise which disturbs America. It is in these realms that one finds discrimination still in the saddle and justice trampled underfoot. It is in these realms that our country must achieve its professed ambitions of equal justice under the law or fail in the most noble aspects of the American experience.” Senator Edward Brooke, 114 Congressional Record 2279-2281 (February 6, 1968).

Much work remains to be done fifty years after Congress enacted the Fair Housing Act. Our practice areas concern the goals of the Fair Housing Act of both equality in housing and neighborhood conditions and removal of exclusionary barriers.