Beryl Satter

Family Properties: Race, Real Estate, and the Exploitation of Black Urban America

Family Properties: Race, Real Estate, and the Exploitation of Black Urban America is a penetrating examination of ghettoization in Chicago and other metropolises across the United States. The daughter of a civil rights attorney, Professor Satter draws on her father's legal files and her own investigative research and personal family history to write a gripping account of discriminatory federal housing policies and financial exploitation meted out to African Americans migrating North - ultimately resulting in segregation, urban blight and poverty. Writing in The Washington Post, historian David Garrow - the author of a Pulitzer-Prize-winning biography of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. - calls Family Properties "the most important book yet written on the black freedom struggle in the urban North." The Washington Post Book World named Family Properties one of the 10 Best Books of the Year for 2009. New York Times reviewer Dwight Garner named Family Properties as one of his "Top 10 Books of 2009."

Chair of the history department at Rutgers University in Newark, Satter is also the author of Each Mind a Kingdom: American Women, Sexual Purity, and the New Thought Movement, 1875-1920.

Review in The New York Times Books of the Times, March 17, 2009

Review in The Washington Post, March 15, 2009

Read the first chapter