Speculators in North Lawndale , and at the edge of the black ghettos, knew there was money to be made off white panic. They resorted to block-busting-spooking whites into selling cheap before the neighborhood became black. They would hire a black woman to walk up and down the street with a stroller. Or they’d hire someone to call a number in the neighborhood looking for Johnny Mae. Then they’d cajole whites into selling at low prices, informing them that the more blacks who moved in, the more the value of their homes would decline, so better to sell now. With these white-fled homes in hand, speculators then turned to the masses of black people who had streamed northward as part of the Great Migration, or who were desperate to escape the ghettos: the speculators would take the houses they’d just bought cheap through block-busting and sell them to blacks on contract.
His wife took a job working at Marshall Field. He had to take some of his children out of private school. He was not able to be at home to supervise his children or help them with their homework.
Money and time that Ross wanted to give his children went instead to enrich white speculators
The problem was the money, Ross told me. Without the money, you can’t move. You can’t educate your kids. You can’t give them the right kind of food. Can’t make the house look good. They think this neighborhood is where they supposed to be. It changes their outlook. My kids were going to the best schools in this neighborhood, and I couldn’t keep them in there.
To keep up with his payments and keep his heat on, Clyde Ross took a second job at the post office and then a third job delivering pizza
Mattie Lewis came to Chicago from her native Alabama in the mid-’40s, when she was 21, persuaded by a friend who told her she could get a job as a hairdresser. Instead she was hired by Western Electric, where she worked for 41 years. I met Lewis in the home of her neighbor Ethel Weatherspoon. Both had owned homes in North Lawndale for more than 50 years. Both had bought their houses on contract. Both had been active with Clyde Ross in the Contract Buyers League’s effort to garner restitution from contract sellers who’d operated in North Lawndale, banks who’d backed the scheme, and even the Federal Housing Administration. We were joined by Jack Macnamara, who’d been an organizing force in the Contract Buyers League when it was founded, in 1968. Our gathering had the feel of a reunion, because the writer James Alan McPherson had profiled the Contract Buyers League for The Atlantic back in 1972.
Weatherspoon bought her home in 1957. Most of the whites started moving out, she told me. The blacks are coming. The blacks are coming.‘ They actually said that. They had signs up: Don’t sell to blacks .
Before moving to North Lawndale, Lewis and her husband tried moving to Cicero after seeing a house advertised for sale there. Sorry, I just sold it today, the Realtor told Lewis’s husband. I told him, You know they don’t want you in Cicero,‘ Lewis recalls. They ain’t going to let nobody black in Cicero.‘
In 1958, the couple bought a home in North Lawndale on contract. They were not blind to the unfairness. But Lewis, born in the teeth of Jim Crow, considered Inverness cash advance payday loans American piracy-black people keep on making it, white people keep on taking it-a fact of nature. All I wanted was a house. And that was the only way I could get it. They weren’t giving black people loans at that time, she said. We thought, This is the way it is. We going to do it till we die, and they ain’t never going to accept us. That’s just the way it is.‘