Part family story and part urban history, a landmark investigation of segregation and urban decay in Chicagoand 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 nations 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 citys 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 Satters 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 profiteersthe authors 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 countrys shameful dual housing market ; the economic anxieties that fueled white violence; and the tempting profits to be made by preying on the citys 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.
