Book Review: Family Properties; by Beryl Satter - washingtonpost.com: ... Rutgers University history professor Beryl Satter, has turned the story of her father and the Boltons into a penetrating examination of the financial discrimination that thousands of African Americans encountered in their northward migration to cities such as Chicago.
Redlining is a familiar, if poorly understood, word for the refusal to insure mortgages in black neighborhoods. Satter shows how it worked in vivid, personal terms. Her painstakingly thorough portrayal of the human costs of financial racism is, in my view, the most important book yet written on the black freedom struggle in the urban North.
In 'Family Properties,' she explains that it was not poverty that made black Chicagoans vulnerable to the likes of Jay Goran, because in 1960 two-thirds of the city's whites and 63 percent of its black residents had comparably modest incomes. Rather, she contends, the blame belongs squarely on 'the racially biased credit policies of the nation's banking industry' and particularly the pre-1965 Federal Housing Administration.
