At the heart of the struggle stand the black migrants who, having left the South with its legacy of sharecropping, suddenly find themselves caught in a new kind of debt peonage. In Satter's riveting account of a city in crisis, unscrupulous lawyers, slumlords, and speculators are pitched against religious reformers, community organizers, and an impassioned attorney who launched a crusade against the profiteers-the author's father, Mark J. In this powerful book, Beryl Satter identifies the true causes of the city's black slums and the ruin of urban neighborhoods throughout the country: not, as some have argued, black pathology, the culture of poverty, or white flight, but a widespread and institutionalized system of legal and financial exploitation. The 'promised land' for thousands of Southern blacks, postwar Chicago quickly became the most segregated city in the North, the site of the nation's worst ghettos and the target of Martin Luther King Jr.'s first campaign beyond the South. Satter became a Guggenheim Fellow in 2015.Part family story and part urban history, a landmark investigation of segregation and urban decay in Chicago - and cities across the nation

Her work served as the basis for Ta-Nehisi Coates's award-winning 2014 article ' The Case for Reparations'.

In particular, they have examined the history of race relations in Chicago, including their connection with the local real estate market, which at times was among the most segregated in the nation. The books she has authored focus mostly on the history of the city of Chicago. She is currently a professor of history at Rutgers University. Satter graduated from Yale University in 1992. In 1965, her father died of heart failure when she was just six years old. Satter, who fought for black families suffering under the ruthless and oftentimes racist conditions that pervaded Chicago's real estate market.

Satter was born on 14 January 1959 as the daughter of civil rights lawyer Mark J. Beryl Satter (born 14 January 1959) is an American historian and a professor of history at Rutgers University.

Family Properties by Beryl Satter