Family Properties
A seminal exploration of segregation and urban degradation in Chicago—and places throughout the country—part family narrative, part urban history.
After serving as the "promised land" for thousands of Southern blacks, Chicago swiftly became the most segregated city in the North, home to the nation's worst ghettos, and the focus of Martin Luther King Jr.'s first campaign outside of the South. Beryl Satter identifies the true causes of the city's black slums and the ruin of urban neighborhoods across the country in this powerful book: a widespread and institutionalized system of legal and financial exploitation, not, as some have argued, black pathology, the culture of poverty, or white flight.
Unscrupulous attorneys, slumlords, and speculators are pitted against religious reformers, community organizers, and an enthusiastic attorney who started a campaign against the profiteers—the author's father, Mark J. Satter—in Satter's gripping story of a city in crisis. The black migrants at the center of the fight are those who, having left the South and its history of sharecropping, have found themselves in a new sort of debt peonage. Satter depicts the interlocking forces at work in their oppression: the banking industry's discriminatory practices; federal policies that created the country's infamous "dual housing market"; economic anxieties that fueled white violence; and the alluring profits to be made by preying on the city's most vulnerable residents.
This enormous book of history, which tells the stories of race, real estate, politics, and money, will permanently reshape our perceptions of the forces that shaped metropolitan America.
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