Despite these efforts, residential segregation remains formidable in Chicago, which now ranks as the third. most segregated city in America. Today, nearly 86 percent of metropolitan Chicago's black population would have to be moved in order for each of Chicago's neighborhoods to reflect the city's overall racial makeup.

The Chicago Freedom Movement was the most publicized effort in the nation's history to spotlight the curse of housing barriers. While its legacy must not be overstated, it did expose, as Bernard LaFayette Jr., one of the campaign's chief strategists, noted in late 1966, the myth "that a Negro can live where he wants to in the North," and it did prove that "large numbers of people in a Northern city can be mobilized for nonviolent direct action in the face of mass violence." This is not a meager message for a country still divided by housing segregation and often seemingly lacking faith that citizens themselves, acting together, can organize for change.