Orange County lauds woman for stand against housing discrimination.

Publication: The Orange County Register (Santa Ana, California) (via Knight-Ridder/Tribune Business News)

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COPYRIGHT 2005 The Orange County Register

Byline: Yvette Cabrera

Mar. 25--On the day the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its decision, Dorothy J. Mulkey's phone at work rang with the news.

She tried hard to contain herself, calmly went to her boss, and told him "something gigantic" had just happened.

"I have to go home," Dottie, as she's known, told him.

He understood.

After a four-year battle for justice, after quietly going about her life and keeping this struggle from colleagues, Dottie was getting her due.

So she headed home to her apartment in Santa Ana, where a throng of journalists were already crowded outside, and celebrated her victory.

"It was like a breath of fresh air had come in," Dottie says.

That was May 29, 1967, the day that Dottie, the daughter of a Kentucky coal miner, and her husband Lincoln W. Mulkey, a Santa Ana mailman, won their lawsuit against a Santa Ana landlord who discriminated against the black couple when they tried to rent an apartment.

Reitman v. Mulkey challenged California's housing measure, Proposition 14, which gave property owners the right to sell or rent to any person they chose, and which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled was unconstitutional.

In the decades since, Dottie has gone about raising her three daughters, faithfully...

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