News

Award Bestowed by Columbia Journalism School, Nieman Foundation at Harvard

(NEWARK, N.J., April 5, 2010) – A Rutgers University, Newark, historian has been named one of only two distinguished finalists for the 2010 J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize, one of three prestigious awards given annually by the J. Anthony Lukas Prize Project Awards for exceptional nonfiction. Associate Professor Beryl Satter was recognized for Family Properties: Race, Real Estate, and the Exploitation of Black Urban America (Metropolitan Books). Her book chronicles her late father’s battles against discriminatory and predatory lending practices a half-century ago when Mark J. Satter was a civil rights lawyer in Chicago.

Lukas Prize Judges praised her book as “a remarkable story of race and real estate. Satter set out to find more about her father, described as the ‘Clarence Darrow of the Bankrupt,’ and about the forces that exhausted him, exploited black homeowners, and drove a wedge into the heart of Chicago. With the cool skill of an historian, the tenacity of a journalist, and the passion of a daughter, she has narrated a tale with echoes of today’s housing disasters.”

Family Properties already has been honored with the 2009 National Jewish Book Award in History and the 2010 Liberty Legacy Award, from the Organization of American Historians. The Washington Post Book World named Family Properties one of the “10 Best Books of the Year for 2009,” and New York Times reviewer Dwight Garner listed Family Properties as one of his “Top 10 Books of 2009.” It was ranked “among the top books of 2009″ by the Progressive Magazine.

Satter will receive her award at a ceremony on May 4, at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University.

Established in 1998, the prizes recognize excellence in nonfiction writing that exemplifies the literary grace and commitment to serious research and social concern that characterized the work of the awards’ Pulitzer Prize-winning namesake J. Anthony Lukas, who died in 1997. The prizes are sponsored by the family of the late Mark Lynton, business executive and author of Accidental Journey: A Cambridge Internee’s Memoir of World War II, who was an avid proponent of the writing of history. The Lynton family has sponsored the Lukas Prize Project since its inception.

For more information on Beryl Satter, please contact Carla Capizzi, 973/353-5263, or email: capizzi@rutgers.edu.