Family Properties by Beryl Satter

Author:Beryl Satter [SATTER, BERYL]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780805076769
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.

NINE

THE BIG HOLDOUT

The Contract Buyers League was born as a West Side organization, but by the end of 1968 the group had been flooded with new members from the South Side. One of the most significant byproducts of the “big holdout” was that it promised—or threatened, from some perspectives—to unite black Chicago.

Black South Siders, more established and upwardly mobile than the more recent, working-class West Siders, had initially kept aloof from the housing struggles in Lawndale. But Sidney Clark changed all that. Originally from Memphis, Clark had come to Chicago at the age of ten, moving with his family into the Altgeld Gardens housing project on the far South Side. In 1958, Clark joined the Chicago police force, making detective seven years later. When the department created a Gang Intelligence Unit in 1967, he volunteered to join. “I didn’t have sense enough to be afraid,” he said of that decision. “I wouldn’t run from a fight. And if you thought you were tough, that’s all right, so did I.” Before long, he won two citations for bravery: the first for saving the life of a teenage gang member, the second for capturing an armed robber.

Clark married his childhood sweetheart, Julia, and they had two sons. He worked hard to create a stable domestic life for his family. When the boys started elementary school, Clark joined the Parent-Teacher Association, soon becoming its president. By the early 1960s, he recalled, he was “a young married man seeking to get further and do better as far as buying a home.” It was with great anticipation that he and Julia purchased a new house in a South Side development created by Universal Builders. The main housing developer in the area, Universal had sold over a thousand newly constructed homes to African Americans. Its salesmen made the process simple. Customers went to see the models on Eighty-seventh Street and decided on the style they preferred; then a salesman took them around to various sites where the house could be constructed. The new house could then be purchased on contract. 1

The Clarks soon noticed problems with their spanking new home. The basement was unfinished. The walls were thin and quickly developed cracks. The Clarks’ dissatisfaction didn’t crystallize, however, until early in 1968, when Sidney read about the CBL in the Chicago Sun-Times. As he followed the story—the inflated prices, the differences between contract sales and conventional mortgages, and the fact that West Siders had been forced to buy on contract because of racially biased mortgage policies—something clicked for him. He realized that for all of their Chicago sophistication, he and his South Side neighbors had fallen into the same trap. They, too, had been cut off from conventional mortgages and pressured into purchasing homes on contract at inflated prices. Clark began talking to his neighbors, who proved remarkably easy to organize. Universal Builders had built the community, and now that community came together. By the summer of 1968, South Siders were beginning to join the Contract Buyers of Lawndale.

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