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BookPrinted Material
Author Satter, Beryl, 1959-

Title Family properties : race, real estate, and the exploitation of Black urban America / Beryl Satter.

Publication Info. New York, N.Y. : Metropolitan Books, 2009.

Item Status

Location Call No. Status OPAC Message Public Note Gift Note
 Moore Stacks  HD7288.76.U52 C434 2009    Available  ---
Edition 1st ed.
Description xi unnumbered pages, 495 pages, 16 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations ; 25 cm
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index.
Contents The story of my father -- Jewish Lawndale -- The noose around Black Chicago -- Justice in Chicago -- Reform : Illinois-style -- The liberal movement and the death of a radical -- King in Chicago -- The story of a building -- Organizing Lawndale -- The big holdout -- The Federal trials
Summary Part family story and part urban history, this work is a landmark investigation of segregation and urban decay in Chicago, and in cities across the nation. 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. In this book, the author identifies the true causes of the city's black slums and the ruin of urban neighborhoods throughout the country. It is 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. This is an 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. Satter. 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. The author 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. This tale of racism and real estate, politics and finance, will forever change our understanding of the forces that transformed urban America.--[Provided by publisher.]
Subject African Americans -- Housing -- Illinois -- Chicago -- History -- 20th century.
African Americans -- Housing.
Illinois -- Chicago.
History.
Chronological Term 20th century
Subject Discrimination in housing -- Illinois -- Chicago -- History -- 20th century.
Discrimination in housing.
Housing policy -- Illinois -- Chicago -- History -- 20th century.
Housing policy.
African Americans -- Illinois -- Chicago -- Social conditions -- 20th century.
African Americans.
Social conditions.
African Americans -- Relations with Jews.
African Americans -- Relations with Jews.
Chicago (Ill.) -- Social conditions -- 20th century.
Chicago (Ill.) -- Race relations -- History -- 20th century.
Satter, Mark J., 1916-1965.
Satter, Mark J., 1916-1965.
Lawyers -- Illinois -- Chicago -- Biography.
Lawyers.
Genre/Form Biographies.
Subject Landlords -- Illinois -- Chicago -- Biography.
Landlords.
Genre/Form Biographies.
ISBN 9780805076769
080507676X