Focusing on Chicago's West Side, After Redlining illuminates how
urban activists were able to change banks' behavior to support
investment in communities that they had once abandoned.
American banks, to their eternal discredit, long played a key role in
disenfranchising nonwhite urbanites and, through redlining, blighting
the very city neighborhoods that needed the most investment. Banks long
showed little compunction in aiding and abetting blockbusting,
discrimination, and outright theft from nonwhites. They denied funds to
entire neighborhoods or actively exploited them, to the benefit of
suburban whites--an economic white flight to sharpen the pain caused by
the demographic one.
And yet, the dynamic between banks and urban communities was not static,
and positive urban development, supported by banks, became possible. In
After Redlining, Rebecca K. Marchiel illuminates how, exactly, urban
activists were able to change some banks' behavior to support investment
in communities that they had once abandoned. The leading activists arose
in an area hit hard by banks' discriminatory actions and politics:
Chicago's West Side. A multiracial coalition of low- and moderate-income
city residents, this Saul Alinsky-inspired group championed urban
reinvestment. And amazingly, it worked: their efforts inspired national
action, culminating in the federal Home Mortgage Disclosure Act and the
Community Reinvestment Act.
While the battle for urban equity goes on, After Redlining provides a
blueprint of hope.
