In 'Family Properties', Beryl Satter uncovers the gripping story of her family's real estate empire and the racially charged struggles that shaped Chicago. Through the lens of her father's daring business ventures, she explores the brutal dynamics of urban housing, discrimination, and the fight for civil rights. The narrative unveils the intersection of wealth and inequality, challenging readers to reflect on the legacy of property ownership. With a blend of personal history and socio-political insights, Satter reveals how family ties can entwine with societal injustices. This compelling account urges us to reconsider our views on home, community, and the American dream.
By Beryl Satter
Published: 2010
"In the tangled web of money and home, the true value lies not in the bricks and mortar, but in the stories of those who claim them as their own."
“Beryl Satter's Family Properties is really an incredible book. It is, by far, the best book I've ever read on the relationship between blacks and Jews. That's because it hones in on the relationship between one specific black community and one specific Jewish community and thus revels in the particular humanity of all its actors. In going small, it ultimately goes big.” —Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Atlantic 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. Family Properties: Race, Real Estate, and the Exploitation of Black Urban America is 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. "Gripping . . . This painstaking portrayal of the human costs of financial racism is the most important book yet written on the black freedom struggle in the urban North."—David Garrow, The Washington Post
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“In the tangled web of money and home, the true value lies not in the bricks and mortar, but in the stories of those who claim them as their own.”
Family Properties
By Beryl Satter
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Beryl Satter is an acclaimed author and historian known for her insightful exploration of civil rights and social justice. She has written notable works including "Family Properties: Race, Real Estate, and the Exploitation of Black Urban America," which examines the intersection of race and real estate in the United States. Satter’s writing style is characterized by meticulous research and a narrative approach that brings historical events to life, making complex social issues accessible to a broad audience. Her work has garnered recognition for its depth and impact on understanding systemic inequalities.
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