Beryl Satter

Beryl Satter’s is a Faculty member at Rutgers University, where she is in the Department of History, the Center for Migration and the Global City, Graduate Program in American Studies, and the Program in Women’s and Gender Studies Her first book, Each Mind a Kingdom: American Women, Sexual Purity and the New Thought Movement, 1875-1920 (University of California Press, 1999) examined the relationship between New Thought, a popular, proto-New Age religious movement, the late nineteenth-century women’s movement, and Progressivism. Dr. Satter’s second book, Family Properties: Race, Real Estate, and the Exploitation of Black Urban America (Metropolitan Books, 2009), won the Liberty Legacy Award in Civil Rights History and the National Jewish Book Award in History, and was a finalist for the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize and the Ron Ridenhouer Book Prize. It told the story of Dr. Satter’s father, attorney Mark J. Satter, who fought exploitative, racially based real estate speculation in Chicago, and the many community activists who continued this battle after Mark Satter’s death. In the late 1960s these activists formed an organization, the Contract Buyers League (CBL), which consisted of African-American residents of Chicago’s West and South Sides. The CBL fought redlining as well as the state and federal laws that enabled racially biased credit policies to flourish. Their efforts ultimately culminated in the passage of two landmark pieces of federal legislation in the 1970s — the Community Reinvestment Act and the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act.