Whites were terrified of the arrival of the blacks and shrewd property speculators fanned the fear by warning whites that blacks were going to move into their neighborhood. It worked like this: Thousands of blacks arriving from the South needed a place to live.

In the racist 1950's taking advantage of blacks was as easy as shooting ducks in a barrel. We meet the clergy and the lawyers (her father a pioneer among them) who sought to make the means of funding property ownership color-blind. Her search for truth frames a larger search for justice by the African-Americans who were denied their rights in the Chicago of 1950 on into the last years of the century. This book brings a complex subject to life with the intimacy of a child longing to know the truth about the life of her father, struck down by a heart attack when she was small. Satter shows the interlocking forces at work in their oppression: the discriminatory practices of the banking industry the federal policies that created the country's shameful 'dual housing market' the economic anxieties that fueled white violence and the tempting profits to be made by preying on the city's most vulnerable population.Ī monumental work of history, this tale of racism and real estate, politics and finance, will forever change our understanding of the forces that transformed urban America. At the heart of the struggle stand the black migrants who, having left the South with its legacy of sharecropping, suddenly find themselves caught in a new kind of debt peonage. In Satter's riveting account of a city in crisis, unscrupulous lawyers, slumlords, and speculators are pitched against religious reformers, community organizers, and an impassioned attorney who launched a crusade against the profiteers-the author's father, Mark J.

In this powerful book, Beryl Satter identifies the true causes of the city's black slums and the ruin of urban neighborhoods throughout the country: not, as some have argued, black pathology, the culture of poverty, or white flight, but a widespread and institutionalized system of legal and financial exploitation. The 'promised land' for thousands of Southern blacks, postwar Chicago quickly became the most segregated city in the North, the site of the nation's worst ghettos and the target of Martin Luther King Jr.'s first campaign beyond the South. Part family story and part urban history, a landmark investigation of segregation and urban decay in Chicago-and cities across the nation

Family Properties by Beryl Satter