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.
