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Race, Real Estate, And The Exploitation Of Black Urban America
Metropolitan Books
March 2009
On Sale: March 17, 2009
512 pages ISBN: 080507676X EAN: 9780805076769 Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
Part family story and part urban history, a landmark
investigation of segregation and urban decay in Chicago—and
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 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. 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.
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. 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. A 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.
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