areas.

>> but which was rapidly becoming black. when he rented to black tenants, he was called a blockbuster. if he were to refuse to rent to them, he'd be called a racist. given his public posture, he could not sell the buildings as black people were beginning to move in, then he would clearly be a hypocrite. if he sold after the neighborhood became all black, he'd find for buyers except the speculators that he was denouncing. of course, he could not participate in the plunder engaged by these real estate speculators so he was basically left with one choice and that is to hold on and that's what he decided to do. he held onto the properties and he tried his hardest to maintain them while the area around them declined. but if his efforts to maintain them failed, then he would be called a slum lord. if the buildings were damaged by tenants, he would be called a slum lord as well.

now what all this shows just as black people who wanted to leave the south side black belt had few choices, so did white people who wanted to stay in nearby urban neighborhoods, neighborhoods to which many felt a profound personal attachment. in this sense, although the ironies were particularly harsh in my father's case his situation was really no different from that from any other white resident or landlord in a changing urban neighborhood. for such people in general, their choices were few. they could become a contract seller themselves enriching themselves and destroying their own form of community. they can sell their property to a real estate speculator since once the process of change got underway, no one else would buy. or they could try to do the right thing, which is basically to do what liberals were preaching and stay in the

neighborhood. but to do so more often than not meant to watch as one neighborhood became overcrowded, neglected, and often crime-ridden. and to watch in horror as one's property declined dramatically in value until defeated at last, the last whites exercised the one option that many of their black neighbors did not have, which is the option to leave and move into, you know, a suburban neighborhood where they were welcomed and black people were not. my father died before he had to face the final indignity of selling his properties for nothing. but in the final months of his life, he suffered because of his powerlessness. and there are lines from herman melville's novel "pierre" that expressed the tragedy of my father's last years in life.

in tremendous extremities human souls are like drowning men. well enough they know they are in peril, well enough they know the causes of that peril. nevertheless, the sea is the sea and these drowning men do drown. i think that's what he faced. he knew it. he understood the situation. he couldn't have known -- no one could have known better than him the financial processes at work but that didn't mean that he could save himself or really his family because when he died and the properties on which he had gambled our financial future became worth nothing, we were left with nothing. and he had five children that he left in that situation. and that's why my relatives thought, you know, he should have gotten out, you know, why did he care about other people? why didn't he watch out for his own family? and these are the kind of

horrible tension that people were put in because this isn't about personalities and it isn't about individual prejudices. it's about a financial system that hits people against each other and leaves very few choices for anyone. now, when i first started this -- researching my book, i thought that my father's untimely death at the age of 49 was also the tragic end of the story of the battle against exploitive contract sales in chicago. i knew that he tied. that his properties were sold to the speculators he'd devoted his life to fighting. and we, his family, were left with nothing. but luckily, i soon found out that my father's death was not the end of the story. and this is -- i'll just tell you how i found out i was wrong, how i researched it, how i stumbled into a very different story in the end. in the course of researching my father's story, i had tried to

track down journalists who had written about him. the first i sought out was paul gap and after much effort i finally locate gap's window. she didn't know anything about my father or his work but she told me if i wanted to know anything about race and housing to chicago the person was to call john eagan. call him right now. his health is failing so get on the phone. so i followed her advice and i wrote a letter to jack eagan and a few days later my phone range and he said you're writing a book about a great man is the first words he said to me. we agreed we would interview him before his work and before it was scheduled i got a call from his lifelong assistant peggy roach. she told me he had been hospitalized that very day. i was completely distraught over the possibility that it was now too late to speak to eagan.

but jack eagan being jack eagan at 7:30 the next morning was jack eagan. he said you need to speak to jack mcnamara. and he explained, you know, quickly to me after my father and he and the jesuit seminarian had picked up the struggles about contract. with that eagan got off the phone. i never spoke to him again. he passed away later that spring. now, a few days after that morning's discussion and i called jack mcnamara. he told me in 1967 he had helped launch a group called the contract buyers league. he said that the group, which

was based in my father's old neighborhood of lawndale, grew to encompass 3,000 african-american families that had purchased homes on contract. led by several african-american buyers and also four migrants and -- migrants in the south and that's significant because one of the -- one of the excuses that people used when they talked by why the neighborhoods went bad oh, these migrants, they're rural people. they don't know how to maintain a house, you know, they blamed them for the problems. and, you know, those people who had mygranted north and saved money and put down their money on houses, they had to face people mocking them and putting them down who didn't know anything about them and with the contractor buyers league, it was those very people -- not all migrants but many migrants from

the south like clyde ross, charlie baker, ruth wells and henrietta banks who stepped forward to talk about and to fight back. now, what the contract buyers league did was use tried and true community organizing to mobilize lawndale. first they went door to door to inform and unite the community about the contract sales issue. what they found almost everyone in the neighborhood in lawndale bought on contract and they did research and found most had paid, you know, double or triple or quadruple what the people who sold them on the property had paid usually only a few weeks before that. so they went door to door and they talked to people and they united people around the issue. the next thing they did was picket contract sellers to demand a renegotiation of the

exploitive contracts. what they wanted not throw the whole thing out they said look it's a capitalist system and you have a right to make money so what we'd like you to do is what they call a fair profit of the 15% so we'll pay you 15% more than what you paid for the property but the rest of it, you know, let it go. it's ridiculous and it's way too high and that's what they asked. that didn't work. the contract sellers were not about to say, oh, yeah, fair profit, that's fine. they said no way. so when that didn't work, the contract buyers of lawndale did something very courageous and dramatic, they went on a payment strike. now, if you remember, if you buy on contract and you miss a payment, the seller has the right to throw you out. so by going on a mass payment strike, they were basically saying -- they were risking l

it led to payment evictions mostly on the south side. these convictions were fought in court. the contractor buyers league also initiated two massive federal lawsuits to challenge the laws and practices that left african-americans vulnerable to speculators. essentially, what these cases tried to do was challenge this country to end its shameful dual housing market, a dual housing market based on race. and i can talk more about that -- those lawsuits, if you want. now, mcnamara was explaining all this to me. and what he was telling me was basically it was the triumphant second half of a story whose truncated beginnings were so carefully detailed in my father's papers. so as he told me all this i was almost afraid to ask my next question, which was do you have any documents about any of this?

and mcnamara, of course i do. he had about two or three cartons of newspapers, newsletters, hand bills, all kinds of, you know, old documents basically about the contract buyers league. he also had the original complaints from the two federal suits. he had several depositions from those suits. he even had a list of contract buyers league members including their current phone numbers and addresses. something he'd compiled a few years earlier for a reunion. and so, you know, if you're a historian and someone tells you, oh, sure, i've got everything, you're very, very happy so i was, you know, amazed and delighted. and i knew right then that i had my story. i had the story and i had the beginnings of the sources i would need to tell it. i didn't stop there. i went on to interview about 90 people. i went -- i looked in a lot of

archives. i turned over a lot of rocks, i'd say, to get really the full story. but between the scrapbooks that my brothers saved and the papers that jack mcnamara saved, the story was there. so just to sum up the meaning of it all, when i think about contracts selling the way i understand it and i think the accurate way to think about it is that it's really just another version of a process that has victimized african-americans from the sharecropping era to our current subprime mortgage crisis. namely, their lack of equal access to credit. my book tells the story of all those who were involved in the northern version of this drama. the unscrupulous lawyers, slum lords and speculators on one side the black activists, community organizizers and radical attorneys like my father

and the black chicagoans, many of whom having moved north to attain a dream of full citizenship instead found themselves caught in a new kind of debt trap. family properties also accounts the stories of the white families who found that the buildings they'd hoped would sustain them instead dragged them down, too. starting with my own family's properties. i think what's important about the book the challenge it pose as i said at the beginning about the assumptions of race and inequality. what i show is that the rapid decline of changing neighborhoods was not the result of a black culture of poverty nor could it be laid to racist whites who hysterically fled their neighborhoods at the first sight of a black face. the african-americans who migrated from the south after world war ii were not poor people. they were people who were sometimes made poor in the north

by white professionals who used their expertise to fleece them. the american dream of a family property was not fair and open to everyone. it was a rich system that lifted many whites while impoverishing many blacks. but as today's headlines show, the scams that typified contract selling extremely high cost loans with numerous hidden fees that practically sure eventual foreclosure have now ensnared millions of americans of all racist backgrounds and that, i think, is a tragedy. when i started this book, i thought, well, this is a story people need to understand the past. but, you know, now i see it's also a story they need to know to understand what's going on in the present. and, you know, as a historian you always hope history won't repeat itself but if you can't stop it from repeating itself, you could at least cast some light on what's really going and

that's what i hope my book can do. okay. thank you. [applause] >> so we have 40 minutes, i think, for questions, if anybody has any. >> i know this might be speculative but was your father -- you called him a radical lawyer. >> right. >> would he have been a radical lawyer if the circumstances would have been different or did he become a radical lawyer because of what happened to him in lawndale? >> that's a good question. >> depth to go to law school to change the world -- >> yes, right, right. good question. it's a good question. what were the roots of his behavior. my father was born in 1916.

and i read somewhere that that generation -- it was the most class-conscious generation in american history because they were the generation that came of age during the great depression and they were the generation that saw many good people lose everything because of a system. so he was raised in that environment. my grandfather, isaac, was an immigrant, a laborer but he had sociali socialist leanings. he was wasn't an intellectual but he felt they were on the right side of things and i think he raised his children to feel that way as well. so my father did, in fact, go to law school to save the world. he wrote -- he had an autobiography that he wrote in college and in it he said, you know, even law school -- being a lawyer might be a hypocrite

profession in an artificial world, it's sort of a teenager kind of words, he thought he could use it to help the working man and he always said, i want to be a lawyer to help working people. and there's even a story about my grandfather that after my father got his degree, one of the neighborhood shop owners came to him and says, great, your son's a lawyer and here's some bills, i'm here to collect. he said i'm sorry my son did not go to law school to help merchants collect his bills. he's on the other side of things. it was always his goal. he joined the communist party very briefly in 1946. he quit within a year because he didn't like having people telling him what to do and, you know, they were trying to tell him how to handle his cases and he said no way. the reason i know this it's all recorded in his fbi files because the fbi spied on him for, you know, a good 20 years. and it was very useful for me

'cause that's how i found out where he went to grade school and high school. they had everything. so good thing he joined the party just for a year. so, you know, but -- you know, he was a member of the national lawyers guild which was a radical attorney's group which was based on the idea that human rights were more important than property rights. so all those things came together in him. he also had a childhood injury. he fell out of a window when he was like 4 and really hurt himself. and he was in a cast for like a year and he was sort of, you know -- had to go on crutches for a year after that and he was called a cripple and made fun of. in his autobiography being an outcast like that on top of everything else helped sharpen his sympathy for people who are picked on and, you know, harassed and just don't have a choice in the matter. and so that kind of injustice --

it might have come from his childhood. it might have come from the environment. it came from a lot of different places but it was always there. >> when did the contract seller became the sheriff -- >> right, right. >> it seems like you and your father before you have explained what the contract seller did in pretty simple terms to understand and secondly did second land trusts have anything to do with the deterioration have anything to do with it? >> two great questions. second, they often put the properties immediately after buying them into a secret land trust so you couldn't trace who the owner was and it made it a lot harder to figure out what was really going on because you couldn't trace the property to find out what had -- who owned it, what they purchased it for, how they sold it so that part. but as far as the first question about why the contract seller

isn't a big of villain as the southern sheriff is a great question. i think he should be. but we like the crude, open, you know, i'm going to set my dogs on those people that's a villain that people -- especially, northerners like it because that's the south has the problem. we don't have a problem. at the same time it was happening, you know, this kind of exploitation was happening in the north. but, you know, it's complicated. it's economic. it's structural. you have to go back to the government. you have to say what did the fha do, you know, to -- i mean, the contract sellers were bad as they were they were ultimately middle men exploiting a loophole that was created by the federal housing administration because of its racist policy. , you know, of refusing to insure mortgages for black people, you know, no matter what their individual credit was.

so i think it was bigger, it was more complicated -- it implicated far more of the nation and i think that's partially why people couldn't get their head around it or wouldn't. you know, also i mean, i'm explaining it clearly, my father explained it, the newspaper people explained it, it tended to come and go. when the cbl, the contract buyers league, finally really pushed this thing into the headlines, you know, then it became known, of course, by then the fha had changed its policy and was insuring. you know, i think it's much easier to try and blame some -- an individual's pathology of racism than to look at an economic structure that really enriches a lot of people and screws over people who don't have as much and don't matter as

much and that's why the southern sheriff is a great symbol. you can make fun of him. it seems like it's a problem in his head if only he knew better, he wouldn't act that way but the contract seller -- it's not -- you know, many of the contract sellers, in fact, said, you know, we're not racist. we love black people. we sell to them, you know? nobody else will. so, you know, they often said, you know, we're just businessmen, you know. and i think many of them, in fact -- i don't think they were, you know, vicious racists as much as callous people who did something that made a lot of money for them and that involved people to whom they did not feel a sense of responsibility. but who did besides the contract buyers themselves. [inaudible] >> the property rights and human rights, you don't want to do

that, do you? >> no, that's what the national lawyers guild did. i actually don't know that much about it. >> this gets to the philosophy of it. >> okay. >> now, i was there on the edges of this at the time. >> uh-huh. >> and i didn't know enough about it to know about the fha's role. >> right. >> did not the fha make things worse? >> yes. ultimately. >> wouldn't we have been better off for quite a while? >> it's a good question and i want to answer it. the fha ultimately did make things worse. they went from a racist policy of refusing to insure mortgages to credit-worthy african-americans that held till about '67 or so. and then in 1968 they flipped

and they said we will insure 100% any mortgage in a -- what they called a riot or riot phone area. so basically they meant in urban black neighborhoods. so they went from not insuring at all to saying we'll insure 100% and that did a lot of damage because what it did was it created a new way for speculators to exploit these neighborhoods and i could explain it -- you probably may have a sense of it already. but what they -- what they would do -- this is the irony of it and once -- i mean, contract buying -- contract selling is a problem ended once the fha changed its policy but the new policy created new problems and this is how it worked. once real estate speculators heard that the fha was going to guarantee any mortgage, you know, 100% based on the area rather than the person who

bought the house, they got busy. what they did was went into these neighborhoods, they would find the most crumbling decrepit piece of property they could find and buy for $5,000 and find a nice fha appraiser and give them a little money and the fha appraiser would say, yeah, it's worth about $20,000. this happened. this is documented. okay. now he's got an appraisal and says this $5,000 property is worth $20,000. so now all he needs is someone to buy it for $20,000. they found people -- and this is -- this one is more similar to what happened -- what's going on now. they would -- they found low-incomed people, minority people who are desperate for housing and they would say, look, you could have a house of your own, $200 down, don't worry about the, you know, paperwork, i'll handle all the paperwork, you know, it'll be fine, given it was in the '70s when all this was happening, a terrible

housing shortage for low-incomed people especially, here comes some guy saying you can have a house of your own, $2,000 down, i'll lend the $200. they would say, okay, and so they would put -- you know, the speculators who had bought this property for $5,000 and wanted to sell it for $20 would fill out all the forms which basically meant they would lie. they would say that these people could afford anything so it was like the liars' loans of today where you don't need documentation. the documentation isn't true and nobody checks so they would go and pick up blank tax insurance forms and say this guy earns $40,000 a year, whatever they wanted, whatever they thought was necessary; hand it over to the mortgage bankers and the mortgage bankers would say, yeah, we'll make the loan, why shouldn't they, it's 100% guaranteed. what do they have to lose. they don't have to check, you know, so they would make the

loan. the speculator would get this huge profit. the mortgage banker would often then sell the loan very much like what's going today so what did they care and even if it wasn't, it's insured so say the buyer, you know, this person who bought this house and finds that it's actually, you know, falling apart and needs all these code repairs and things like that. they say i can't handle it anymore. they walk away and abandon it. if they stop making the payments, the federal government pays back the mortgage company it's insured 100%, you know. no problem. so the speculators make a killing. the, you know, the mortgage bankers make a killing, the people who don't are the buyer who put down money and, you know, had, you know, hopeful intent and was sold a property that in many cases didn't -- you know, was beryl liveable and, of

course, u.s. taxpayers, the federal government, who had to bail all this out. this was a huge scandal and we've completely forgotten about it. just like we'd forgotten, you know, the contract selling in the '60s. the fha scandals of the '70s led to the destruction of a quarter million properties, 25,000 alone. they say riots is what hurt michigan. what hurt michigan was the housing. if you can, you know, it's actually what's really going on so, yes -- i mean, its policies ultimately caused a lot of problems. and, you know, it doesn't mean it will always cause problems. i mean, it's a federal agency. it could be redesigned and, you know, it could work better, you know, and, in fact, as much as

you could criticize the fha for destroying urban neighborhoods and changing neighborhoods, it was very good for whites who moved to the suburbs. it worked beautifully for them for 30, 40 years. it guaranteed their mortgages and enabled them to put $5,000 down and get a brand-new house in the suburbs and, you know, so in that sense you could say it worked for them, you know. so i think it's complicated to say whether it works or doesn't work. it works in some ways and doesn't work in others. and it changes. >> i just have a quick question -- [inaudible] >> in a worse position than somebody who's just paying rent and be can evicted. i mean, do they have additional responsibilities. >> sure, yeah. they do. someone who buys on contract has basically the worst of renting and the worst of owning. like a renter they pay month by month, you know, they can be evicted but like an owner they

pay taxes. they pay insurance. they pay interest. on the money that they're paying off and they are responsible for all maintenance. a renter is not. so if you're a contract buyer and, you know, mr. housing inspector comes around, it's your problem. if you're a renter, it's your landlord's problem. it's a lot worse. plus, of course, one more thing, they give -- they put down payments. renters -- i mean, they may put down some down payment but contract buyers put down the same type of down payment a buyer might. [inaudible] >> they would put down down payments. in some cases they down, you know, a third of the housing costs and then if they miss a payment, they lose it all. >> how particular was this problem to chicago? was it happening in other northern cities. >> it happened in some, not all.

it happened in baltimore, cleveland, indianapolis -- you know, sort of here and there. it depended on the legal structure of each place. in new york, it was not that common. new york is more of a rental market, new york city. so their problems had -- you know, exploitation centered around landlords charging higher rents because most people weren't buying. but in cities where purchasing property was the way to go, that tended to be where contract sellers acted. also, some states had some laws protecting contract buyers. ours didn't, you know? so it varied by state and it varied a bit over time. but the main cities were the ones that i mentioned. [inaudible] >> of course, this is ira, he can ask a question. this is my good friend. [inaudible]

>> well, you know, not -- i mean, the ones on the other side weren't cooperative, you know, i wrote pleading letters saying i just want to hear your side of the story. i'll be really nice. i just want to listen and they wouldn't answer. one guy finally reached and he -- once -- he asked me a few questions and figured out who my father was and hung up on me. [laughter] >> but there was one person in particular who he -- he knew my father well -- he worked with my father, in fact, but he grew up with some of these contract sellers, the people who became contract sellers in the same neighborhood, and, you know, he had a little sympathy for them and he knew them personally so he was actually my best source as to how those people felt. you know, because he was friendly with some of them.

so that was an amazing, you know, coup for me because i didn't know how i was going to get at it. and, you know, we were just talking and, you know, i said did you, you know, know any of these people by any chance? did you see them in court or anything and he looked at his wife and he said, marsha, should we tell her and marsha said, yeah, go ahead, tell her. well, actually i grew up with one of the worst of them, al berland was the worst one. he was later convicted of arson. he was, you know, a pretty rough character and this guy had been a childhood friend and told me his whole story and that was about as close as i came to that side. yes. >> the potential scope of this book is sprawling. you have so many issues that probably could be the subject of a separate book and i'm just curious, what were the historians choices you made in deciding what to leave out.

>> mainly my editor's choice what to leave out. it was originally 200 pages longer than it is now. and she did a lot of cutting. it was my father's story and the contractor buyers story. i kind of felt like you needed to understand the daily machine and you needed to understand public housing and, you know, the black sub machine in chicago. and, let's see, the battle over open occupancy legislation, the role of the national association of real estate boards, martin luther king's crusade. i felt like you had to know all of those things so actually i kind of put everything in that i thought you needed to know, you know. i put it in more concisely. what the book is about is a structure.

and a structure is composed of pieces. and you can't leave a piece out. it's not the structure then, you know? so i felt i had to include all those elements. some people said the book is so complicated and i'm having trouble. people say, oh, yeah, it's the whole story, you know, but it gets back to that question about why we don't -- why that's not an image the way the sheriff is. you know, it's complicated on the other hand, you know, what kind of image of racism is it some guy in his office, you know, fha guy in his office like signing loan forms or not. that's not the kind of image that will mobilize people. we got to stop that guy signing papers. so i basically let it go where it needed to go. in the end. i did it just in not as many words as i could. yes. >> i'm just wondering about your

insights about a man who failed in his goal, someone who saw a massive societal wrong and saw that he was failing completely to succeed at writing it. >> you're asking -- >> what are the insights about your father knowing and seeing that he was failing. >> i think, as i said, he had a tragic final year. and, you know, someone else asked me a similar question recently and i said, you know, given that, you know, he couldn't change it, you know, how do you think he felt about all of this, you know? and, you know, my answer then and now is that, you know, even though my father, you know -- i think the tragedy for him was the fear about his children. knowing that they might not have, you know, a comfortable life because of his choices. and i think that was a brutal thing for a sick man to face,

you know. but at the same time, i think he was a fighter. was always a fighter. was a fighter as a child. all the way through and he -- he was an activist and the activist mentality is that you fight when something is wrong. and you don't fight for the purpose of succeeding and winning and triumphanting, you fight because it's wrong. you fight something that's wrong for that reason. and i think, you know, even though he had -- he suffered from fear about what would become of his children and his wife, i think at the same time he wouldn't undo it and say well, i shouldn't have fought this fight, you know? i think he would have done it again, you know. but that doesn't mean his relatives would be happy about it, you know? and in the end i think he also may have partially fooled

himself a little bit because he was hospitalized when he was dying he wrote letters to my mother and my siblings and i read them and in it he repeatedly says we have to hold onto to those buildings. those buildings are going to turn around. they're going to help us. we'll almost have them paid off don't let them go no matter what. he kind of knew but he also forced himself, i think, to believe that they would one day actually support us and i think that might have been how he kept himself going in the end. >> you mentioned mr. eagan and your dad. were there any african-american community leaders, lawyers, ministers who got involved in leading this fight? and then also perhaps dr. king when he was here in 1966 -- and then also as a second question, what was the outcome of some of

these class action lawsuits? >> yeah. it's interesting, the chicago urban league didn't really pick up on the contract sales thing. i mean, they kind of -- they wrote about it. they were a bit supportive. they weren't leaders in it. you know, there were black activists -- you know, the older black progressives, the people -- the type of people that you wrote about in your book, the black leftists, journalists who supported the struggle early on like lou palmer, wesley south supported this. he was a announcer, and he talked about it. people like that publicized it. but really the leaders were the contract buyers. it was clyde ross and ruth wells, you know, the people in the community themselves, ultimately they were the ones who really stepped forward, who did the organizing, who did the talking, who put the properties

on the line and who put everything on the line. and they weren't, you know, the known -- they weren't the black establishment. they were just -- they were the residents. i mean, martin luther king wouldn't touch it, you know, the contract buying issue. it was explained to him. he said it's too complicated and he also believed that contract buyers were homeowners and, therefore, too well off for him to focus on so he didn't focus on them. i mean, i think, you know, where you find black activism around this might be, you know, black people who are trying to set up mortgage banks for black people, run by black people, to loan to black people and that's why i read a lot about dempsey travis who was a mortgage banker, you know, after years of struggle finally was able to set up cbart, you know, mortgage company and that was his way to deal with the mortgage contract problem. he was well aware about it and

angry about it. he said when he first set out in the real estate business, that he was offered the chance to be a bird-dog for contract sellers that fined them. i would rather starve but his way of dealing with it let's get, you know, blackmun together. it was a huge struggle, you know, but he did it. there were also people like william arming, jr., a black attorney, who wrote about -- he was a graduate of the university of chicago law school. he wrote about fha policies like in the late '40s, one of the first people to write about it, very critical of it. but, you know, he pursued his own career. he was part of the naacp. he participated in a lot of important suits but he didn't get into organizing contract buyers. he did become one of the attorneys who represented them when they filed those two lawsuits. so that gets to the second question.

what happened, you know -- partially i don't want to tell you because i want to leave some suspense, you know, because, you know, the book goes through, you know, the ups and the downs and the whole courtroom drama and i don't want to give it all away, but, you know, it's hard to win a case like that. it was brilliantly argued and they found lawyers to represent them for free not only bob ming but also tom sullivan, tom budell, richard french, john tucker so these attorneys did a good fight and it went on for 12 years and do you really want me to tell you what happened? some people are saying, no, don't give away the end. i hate it when people do that. [inaudible] >> yeah, in the end it did and

it didn't. it didn't have a big affect in the immediate, you know, aftermath but it did contribute to some very, very important federal laws that did try to do what my father always said was needed and what the contract buyers obviously said was needed, which is getting mortgage money into minority neighborhoods and basically what the lawsuits ultimately contributed to were two pieces of legislation, the home mortgage disclosure act and the community reinvestment act. and basically the first one requires banks to say who they're loaning to because before that you couldn't prove they were loaning to black people well, they say that's confidential information and we don't keep those kinds of records anyway and we just can't tell you but this says you have to report your loans by area code. and that way you can tell if it's an area code that's all black and there's no loans being

made there but they're accepting deposits, clearly they're doing the wrong thing with that community. they're taking money but refusing to lent it out. community reinvestment act said that they needed to reinvest money in those communities but it's very interesting because i don't know if everyone knows about the naacp lawsuit that's just been launched like a week ago. basically, the naacp has found, based on, you know, plentiful evidence that wells fargo and hsbc seem to have pushed black buyers into subprime loans -- black buyers who needed loans to buy a house were three times as likely as white buyers to get subprime loans across, you know, the same income level and black people who took out second mortgages, you know, to

refinance mortgages were six times to be given subprime loans by wells fargo and hsbc than whites of identical qualifications, six times, not double, not triple, quadruple. it's a very extreme disparity here. and the interesting thing is they are now saying we need something like the home mortgage disclosure act and we need information so that we can see how those loan decisions were made, you know? they want to know because wells fargo for one is getting government bailout money, you know, what were they doing, how did it work? they want to know. it's a cycle back again the same issue of, you know, we need some information here on how these things are going because we're seeing a pattern that's really statistically way out, you know? and there might be a reason for it and it might not be a good one. and we need to know. >> what about va home loans? >> va home loans, how did that work?

va home loans, they didn't discriminate based on race. but there was another problem. for black buyers. the way it worked was that if you -- what the va did was they appraised individual houses and then made a loan based on the house's value, you know? so what happened to a lot of black vets was that they would find a house for sale and it would be for sale at, you know, $15,000, you know? and they'd say well, i'm going to try to get a va loan for it and the va would come out and say it's worth $10,000, $8,000 and we'll loan you $6,000 we can't loan you for $18,000. it's ridiculous. it's too overpriced and they couldn't buy the house but they could buy it on contract for $500. that's how they got caught. sometimes it worked but,

unfortunately, other times it didn't. can we give somebody who hasn't talked? okay. where are we going? did you ask a question? yeah, go ahead. i'm sorry. i'm confusing everyone here. >> i got a chance to go through the book thoroughly and there are a few things in here -- for example, the book is dedicated to paul, right? >> yes. >> and david is mention once or twice and not in a particularly affirmative way but i wonder what your relationship with him is now and how does he fit into your life? >> my brother, david? >> the one who wrote the article for the new republic. >> yes. you know, it's good. i wrote in the acknowledgements

that he was -- what was the word, very honest, basically. i mean, the chapter i have on my brother david -- my brother david wrote an article after my father died when he was only 18 years old. he was a sophomore at the university of chicago, and he -- and in it he argued welfare was the cause of the decline of neighborhoods like lawndale so it seemed to be, you know, the inverse of what my father would say. and that article, even though it was written by an 18-year-old kid got picked up by the new republic and got written and everyone was lauding even though his fathers couldn't get his articles into the new republic. it had to do with the context, you know, what people wanted to hear, what they were toward hear. david -- the only reason i wrote the chapter is because david told me, you know, it's based on what he told me. he gave me -- he talked to me about all this. in a very honest and generous

way. and i'm very grateful to him for it. so i thought he might have trouble with the book but i had him read it before it came out and, you know, he said, you know, go. go with it. he said he was more interested in having a true story out no matter how complicated than shading anything. and i'm actually quite proud of homework i think that's a very brave stance so he's been supportive. he's telling everybody about the book and, you know, being a brother. [inaudible] >> what did become of your mother and of your other siblings? >> well, here's my sister. julie, what happened? [laughter] [inaudible]

>> no, we're fine. i mean, what happened is my mother -- you know, we carried on. my mother was -- did have one piece of property that wasn't on the west side that was in south shore. my father owned a house in south shore, after his death, she was able to sell that one. the west side ones give away nothing, you know? the south side she got a little bit and she went in with her sister on a two-flat in skokie and that's where we moved. so we weren't rich, you know? we didn't have extra money, but we were okay, you know? we just lived a quiet basic life of family, you know? [inaudible] >> yeah, we did -- we followed our own journeys. there are five of us, you know? we went in five completely different directions, i think. right, fair enough? [laughter] >> so, you know, it wasn't easy, though, i think after my father's death, honestly.

i mean, my mother had cancer at the same time. she was ill. so it was a tough time. the relatives helped us. my father's brother sent us money. on a regular basis. my mother's sister helped, you know, and that's where i think the relatives were like well, we're helping, you know, where's he, you know? i think that was part of their upset at my father was that, you know, we did -- we did okay, you know, well, even but it was with the help of family members and with the help of social security, which you get when you lose a parent, you know. things like that. [inaudible] >> ah, anybody who had some questions. nope, you're okay. all right. >> yeah.

there were pretty powerful democratic organizations in lawndale for the 29th and 24th ward. now, did the l rods and the bernie knights did they take the side of the contract sellers or did they align themselves with their new constituents who were moving in and were paying -- >> guess which? [laughter] >> which ones. >> whose side did they take. >> whose side would they go in? the sides with money or the sides without money. no they didn't take up with the contract sellers. they were absentee alderman. they might have been powerful but i don't have any evidence of them helping the contract buyers. and i think they would be more likely they would be more sympathetic to people who had money. i don't know for sure -- i came across nothing indicating any of those people doing anything. i mean, there's more research to be done, a lot more. and i'm really glad there's some

graduate students, one at least i know at northwestern, who's currently working on the contract buyers league and she wants to get into a lot of things that i didn't get into. i think she's going to look more closely at the black political leaders and their relationship to the contract buyers and all kinds of things that i touch upon but i didn't delve into, you know? but i saw nothing helpful from them. there were people like gus savage and some of the independents, they tried to help. they did align themselves with the contract buyers but they were the independents. they were the ones trying to get in. not the established people. which you might expect. there's a question over here. >> when does change have to occur. change is the word of the day. how did the fha change? how did the red lining stop, what was it, public indignation? was it the court?

>> what made them change from running to running a lot? >> the flip. >> it was a bad flip. >> what causes that? >> they were -- there were some political pressure. this was, you know, 1968 was when -- i forget the name of the act but it was a fair housing act that was passed and it was a kind of sloppy effort to rectify a past wrong. the contract buyers league was just getting started around there, you know, they were part of a pressure to change things. i think it was sort of the last gasp of a '60s, you know, effort -- 1960s effort to address some wrongs but again, it was sloppily done and the other thing was that it happened -- 1968, that's when nixon got in and nixon was not terribly fond of the fha or anything that -- you know, he

was on the side of the white ethnics, basically. and so under nixon, the fha was staffed by a lot of corrupt and incompetent people to be straightforward. and, you know, that's part of the reason things got so out of hand. there was both massive corruption and heavy cuts 'cause government has to be small. so the people who knew anything in the fha were kicked out. the people who came in were just patronage people. and that's part of why an idea that might -- if it had been planned well and carefully implemented have done good ultimately did not do good. so change has to be done carefully. which, you know, right now you would keep seeing there's one, you know, rescue after another and then oops we didn't think it through and we'll try again but i think they're really trying and i think they're not going to try to do it on the cheap, which is -- there's a problem with trying to make government fix something but not letting it do it with any manpower, you know,

that it might need. i think that might be something we could think about for now. >> did you have any positive developments -- >> yes, yes. all grew out of the activism of that period, absolutely. absolutely. that was some of the stuff that i actually had to cut but it's all in the footnotes. about sure bank and ron brzezinski. it was painful because there's wonderful people who did great things. they had housing activists and it was a part of the mood of this period and a lot of people were related, you know, from the cbl moving through to those people. yes, they were great. and sure bank which came out of south shore is now a leading community investment bank all over the world is a model for that kind of banking so it's --

there were, you know, chicago was a very harsh place but it was also a place where real solutions grew. and i think they go together, you know, you had to really be facing things at its most bear to say we've got to fight back and we've together think it through and do it right so i think that's that double legacy of chicago is a harsh place and is an activist place also. [inaudible] >> the schooling and how black students were going for half-days and because of overcrowding. >> uh-huh. >> and then you said that led to gangs. i wonder if you could expand on that. >> you know, this i got from some dissertations and things that were written, you know, i don't know that that was the reason but what people said, who were interviewed in lawndale at that time was the kids are running wild.

the kids have found a way to pull themselves together and take care of themselves and it's the gangs. that's how the residents at the time said. the kids -- this is a quote from one of the things that i read. the kids learned that if they came together, they could take over the neighborhood. they could control the neighborhood so they said that's what they did, you know. i don't have anything specific on specific gangs and how they specifically recruited and what they were doing in lawndale but people felt that there was this -- you know, that these kids were left to hang in a way, you know, and this double-shifting -- ira had asked, you know, was contract selling elsewhere? double-shifting was common in the '60s philadelphia dith and a lot of cities there was this gross indifference to the education of black students. the alternative would have been let them go to nearby white schools that had empty classrooms. no we can't do that, you know, better to give them a half-day of school, you know?

so that's the connection. it's a speculative connection in part but it's based on what people were saying. >> thank you. >> you're welcome. time, it looks like we're done. okay. thank you. [applause] >> beryl satter is the author of each mind of kingdom, american women, sexual purity and the new thought movement 1875 to 1910. she's the chair of the history department the rutgers university newark. for more information about the author visit history.njit.edu. ♪ >> this summer book tv is asking, what are you reading? >> well, i just finished

recently a pretty big book of liberal fascism and i had to read a lot of stuff for that and the stuff i confessed i've been reading most have been graphic novels. it's common books for grownups but i'm right now reading a book called rebirth of a nation by jackson lears which i'm going to be reviewing for national review. it's pretty good so far. it's very ideologically i have some problems with it but it's a good read about the sort of intellectual currents that lead to progressive era. i've been reading some stuff by the academic -- by the social scientist sherry berman about social democracy which is pretty good and i picked up a book called meth land because i think meth is sort of an interesting phenomenon which is not a good thing. books i would