PDF 1949: The First Israelis by Tom Segev in History

Description

Part family story and part urban history; a landmark investigation of segregation and urban decay in Chicago -- and cities across the nationThe "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