BOOKS REVIEW: Cash on the Block: The Broken Promise of Reinvestment in Black Urban Neighborhoods by Beryl Satter
Written by SP Editor
We Found the Enemy and IT'S NOT US
There is no end To what a living world Will demand of you.
—Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower (1993)
In 1972, Gale Cincotta stood in front of 2,000 neighborhood representatives at the first National Housing Conference in Chicago and said: "We found the enemy, and it's not us." Then she said: "It's the bankers!"
Those same banks have since been gobbled up multiple times, and in 2008 caused a global financial crisis that wiped out half of all Black wealth. The crisis cost $500 billion in direct government bailouts and $20 trillion in total economic losses. Black family net worth relative to white net worth dropped from 9 cents on the dollar in 2005 down to just 5 cents on the dollar by 2009.
This followed a half century of organizing by civil rights organizations, National People's Action (NPA), ACORN, and many others to stop racial discrimination in lending, on the job, and in government policy. It's enough to make one despair — unless you've got an organizer's fighting spirit. Then you want to know exactly how the banks and corporate-conservative right captured the government, rigged the rules in their favor to siphon wealth from people (especially Black communities) and the public to themselves, and set the stage for today's authoritarian project.
Reagan called government "the problem." Former NTIC and NPA executive director George Goehl countered with “government is the prize, not the problem. Most of what we organize for today should be functions of government. Why they are not is central to Beryl Satter's magnificent opus Cash on the Block: The Broken Promise of Reinvestment in Black Urban Neighborhoods (Harvard, 2026).
Cash on the Block explores how in the past half century "most private, semiprivate, and governmental plans to lend or invest in Black urban neighborhoods have been duplicitous at best." It is the long-awaited sequel to Satter's groundbreaking Family Properties: Race, Real Estate, and Exploitation of Black Urban America (2009), which exposed how predatory contract sales by white real estate speculators stripped wealth from Black communities in mid-twentieth-century Chicago. Where Family Properties showed how modern racial wealth gaps were intentionally engineered by both private financial networks and government policies, Cash on the Block shows what happened when organizers tried to reverse the damage — and how the financiers and their political allies fought them every step of the way.
Where there is racial and gender discrimination, there is resistance. Pauli Murray, the Black feminist lawyer whose civil rights work spanned decades, named what that organizing made impossible to ignore: "Racism and sexism … have shared some common origins, displayed similar manifestations, reinforced one another, and are … deeply intertwined in the country's institutions." To be successful, the fight against one must include the fight against the other.
Cash on the Block is also personal for me, because my own political formation happened inside the story Satter tells. In the summer of 1989, I found myself doing data entry on a Kaypro computer under the guidance of Dr. Calvin Bradford, a sociologist and longtime NPA ally. This was a five-year study of the impact of the Neighborhood Lending Program that included three banks that NPA had forced to the table to negotiate community reinvestment agreements. The following year, at the ripe age of nineteen, I had a full-time job at the desk next to Shel Trapp, NPA's staff director. When reading about this era, I am reminded of something Wade Rathke (publisher of Social Policy and founder of ACORN) said about his own youthful experience in the National Welfare Rights Organization: "I was nineteen years old and knew everything there was to know about organizing. I have been trying to get back to that enlightened place ever since."
In 2008 I was in NPA's first meeting with Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke, helping to staff a meeting of homeowners confronting Bernanke about his failure to center the people most affected by the bank-induced financial crisis. At the time I was executive director of the Northwest Bronx Community & Clergy Coalition, and at one point in the meeting my board member Heidi Hynes slammed her fist on the big ornate oval table at the Fed and demanded that Bernanke face the brutal fact that "children are being evicted" because of his actions. No one had called him to account on his home court before. He was visibly shaken, angry and embarrassed.
That NPA meeting was the culmination of a story Satter tells better than anyone. It began in Chicago, with Aglaia "Gale" Cincotta, a Greek-Latvian immigrant mother of six who never finished high school, joined her local PTA in 1965 to figure out why her fourth-grader hadn't been taught to read, and ended up founding one of the most consequential organizing networks in modern American history. Satter quotes NPA leader and Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement member Brenda LaBlanc as saying that Cincotta would "talk to the head of the Federal Reserve Board like he was the guy next door whose dog was shitting in her yard."
Satter's Framework: King, Carmichael-Hamilton, and Zweig
What makes Cash on the Block different from most histories of redlining and predatory lending is the analytical scaffolding Satter builds on. She writes standing on the shoulders of three Black radical thinkers who had already named the enemy decades before her.
Her first touchstones are two books published in 1967 — Martin Luther King Jr.'s Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? and Stokely Carmichael (the former chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, SNCC) and Charles V. Hamilton's Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America. In Where Do We Go from Here, King had called for "a massive federal program for all the poor, along the lines of A. Philip Randolph's Freedom Budget, a kind of Marshall Plan for the disadvantaged." Satter draws four principles shared by these authors to guide how reinvestment in disinvested Black communities ought to work:
- Plans to revive Black urban neighborhoods must be based on an understanding of what caused their decay.
- Reinvestment plans should be largely shaped by residents of disinvested communities.
- Reinvestment policies cannot succeed until Americans reject centuries-old tropes about African Americans' intrinsic inferiority, and reject the social Darwinist worldview that promotes cutthroat competition over mutual responsibility.
- Rejecting dehumanizing values—specifically, a social Darwinist worldview that promotes cutthroat competition in pursuit of individual wealth.
Her second touchstone is Michael Zweig's 1972 essay "The Dialectics of Black Capitalism," which argued that most corporate and government reinvestment schemes used "the ghetto as a conduit for financial transfers among whites." Satter extends this further, tracing Zweig's analysis back to J. A. Hobson's 1902 Imperialism: A Study, which examined how the British government subsidized its colonies' development. The synthesis is damning: extractive and racist colonial practices implemented within the United States itself. The ghetto-as-conduit lens exposes the role of racism in most federal income, banking, and poverty policies of the past hundred years — and certainly in urban reinvestment policies for the past sixty.
This is why the title is not metaphorical. Anti-Black racism is the engine of the entire edifice. Every policy that you'd think was designed to help Black communities was designed to siphon wealth from them. The Federal Housing Administration. Check. The Fair Housing Act of 1968 and the creation of HUD. Check. As Satter puts it: "exploitation can only be remedied if its causes are understood."
How NPA Built Itself — and the CRA
Cash on the Block dives deeply into the interracial organizing of NPA that led to important victories first on reforming HUD and FHA practices, and then leading the passage of the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act in 1975 and the Community Reinvestment Act in 1977.
The NTIC — the National Training and Information Center, NPA's research and technical support partner — was created in May 1972 in Baltimore at a follow-up meeting to the first National Housing Conference. NTIC did the data work. NPA did the direct action. Together, they made Gale Cincotta into a national leader and made the bankers' redlining visible to Congress.
Satter is honest about both the victories and the limits. The activists wrote the original Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA) on a rectory floor. Trapp recalled, "we wrote the HMDA from about 8 o'clock at night until 4 o'clock Sunday morning. It was airtight." Then Senator William Proxmire, the bill’s sponsor and champion but also a pragmatist, pared it down. By the time sausage-making was over, only about 40 percent of what activists wrote made it into law. The final HMDA "simply called for depository institutions — banks and S&Ls — to make yearly reports on the number and location of their mortgage loans." It didn't even cover mortgage bankers — the very institutions behind the lion's share of predatory HUD-FHA loans.
The Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) followed two years later, with the same pattern. The NPA wanted the law to "require financial institutions to help meet the credit needs of the communities in which they are chartered." Proxmire's final version contained no mention of racism or discrimination. "Gone was the NPA's language about 'historically neglected communities' or the credit needs of 'lower income persons, women, and persons from minority groups.'" The CRA that passed was a half-measure at best. Cincotta was blunt about it: "That's not what I would call regulation." But there was still a hell of a party when it passed. Communities had a new tool to fight disinvestment: data to prove their case.
The lesson that every organizer needs to take from this is that the law was a more powerful tool than opponents imagined — because activists learned how to wield it. While weaker than desired, it had built-in levers for communities to intervene in bank mergers and expansions in order to force banks to the table. Within a decade, NPA and its Chicago Reinvestment Alliance had used the CRA to win $200 million in reinvestment commitments from First Chicago, Harris Bank, and Northern Trust. Twelve other cities copied the Chicago playbook. By 1994, the Neighborhood Lending Program alone had financed 14,000 units of low- and moderate-income housing. Real change was won.
The Racial Anatomy of Bank Lending
Satter's most important analytical move is to show that race, gender, and class were never separate systems in federal lending policy — they were one system, designed to extract wealth from Black women in particular and from Black communities generally.
By the early 1970s, "redlining" had become the accepted term for lenders' denial of credit to nonwhite neighborhoods. The allusion was explicit: lenders "draw red lines on maps around neighborhoods they consider 'high risks.'" This harkened back to the "red" or D-rating that FHA appraisers gave to most African American neighborhoods, regardless of class status. When Dr. Bradford enrolled in an American Institute of Real Estate Appraisers course in 1973, he discovered the appraisal industry's foundations were saturated with racist bias. Appraisers accepted as "fact" that neighborhoods lost value when "people who are different" from current residents "infiltrate" the community. As Bradford told it: the most senior appraisers believed that Black and Jewish residents had "this disease they brought with them that destroyed neighborhoods." He had found the smoking gun.
Lenders' discrimination against women compounded the racial exclusion. "Banks routinely refused loans to single women, including widows." When the Fair Housing Act of 1968 and the new HUD took over from redlining banks, they did not end the extraction — they rechanneled it. HUD-FHA programs "pushed low-income African Americans to take on tens of thousands of dollars of debt to own aging properties that were likely to decline in value." Welfare mothers, many of them African American, were "perfect targets for real estate brokers hoping to sell price-inflated homes with HUD-FHA mortgages." One Black welfare mother put it bluntly to Satter: "They say they want you off welfare, but they never, never let you get ahead even a little bit."
Behind every "welfare mother" in this analysis is an organizer. In 1967, Johnnie Tillmon, a shop steward turned welfare mother, organized her housing complex in Watts door by door, eventually pulling several hundred welfare mothers into the local welfare rights organization. Her work and dozens of similar efforts nationwide coalesced into the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO) that same year. Tillmon's description of AFDC remains the most damning single line in Satter's book: "The truth is that A.F.D.C. is like a supersexist marriage. You trade in a man for the man." Satter puts the welfare rights struggle at the center of her story precisely because it linked the attack on Black women's bodies to the attack on Black women's households — and organized the resistance accordingly.
In the 1990s and 2000s, the same machine ran in a new form. Subprime lenders used "vulnerability marketing" to find Black and Latino customers for their products. They also targeted women of all incomes and ethnicities. "Elderly Black women were particularly hard hit. One housing advocate noted that the typical victim of predatory subprime loans was 'elderly, African-American widow.'" Cincotta said it bluntly: those receiving subprime loans "lost control of the equity in their own homes. Once lenders got homeowners to 'sign on the dotted line, it was like turning on a vacuum cleaner with a direct connection to the dollars tied up in the … house.'"
The pattern is unmistakable. Whether redlining, contract sales, HUD-FHA overpricing, or subprime predation — each iteration took wealth out of Black communities, and particularly out of Black women's households, and put it into banks, brokers, and the federal insurance funds that guaranteed their loans. Government regulation was the delivery mechanism. Anti-Black racism was the design. Sexism was the targeting mechanism. Class politics was the rhetoric that said this was just "the market." Satter insists on seeing all four together.
Why Interracial Organizing Mattered Then — and Now
The thing I most want today's organizers to take from this book is the how of NPA's interracialism. It wasn't a moral appeal but a strategic necessity built from concrete, shared pain.
In 1971, Shel Trapp became executive director of the Northwest Community Organization (NCO), a largely white, working-class group on Chicago's West Side. NCO members brought him into the fight against bank redlining because their own neighborhoods were being devastated. White, working-class Chicagoans were losing access to credit alongside their Black neighbors, and the financial industry didn't care about the racial makeup of the people it was fleecing — only about which side of which color line they lived on.
Satter quotes Cincotta explaining how the coalition came together: "White people were told the problem was blacks. Blacks were told the problem was whites. And Hispanics were pitted against both. Our object was to take all that anger … and channel it constructively."
This is exactly what Joe Mariano, a longtime organizer and former executive director of NTIC and NPA, told Satter about the people they organized: "Many of the people we organized would have supported Trump today." They lived in disinvested communities, rural and urban. They distrusted "elites." Many were motivated by their religious faith. They wanted drugs out of their communities. They are the targets of right-wing populism today — except NPA organized them into multiracial coalitions rather than turning them against their neighbors.
Larry Ginter, a white Iowa farmer and Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement (Iowa CCI) member, said it best about a national NPA conference: "The unification of rural and urban people of all races made my experience at NPA one of the greatest weekends of my life." Today's organizers should print that quote and tape it to the wall.
The Women Who Held It Together
Satter insists we understand what NPA looked like from the inside. It was, from the start, a coalition built and run largely by women — Black women, white women, Latinas — in a "male dominated" organizing world, with no barriers to leadership, dues, or officers. As one ally recalled, "Gale and Shel's view was if you want to be a leader, you show up. And if you show up often enough and you say things and people respect it, you're going to be a leader. And if you don't like it, you just go home. You can't join. You can't quit."
For example, Marilyn Evans was on welfare when Ted Wysocki, a white NPA organizer and founding editor of Disclosure, hired her as a VISTA volunteer — a small legal trick because the stipend didn't count against her benefits. Evans herself credited Cincotta with the transformation. "In some ways my story was what Gale Cincotta was all about," she said, because Cincotta convinced women to "face challenges we thought we couldn't conquer." Evans went on to chair the NTIC Board in 2003.
Lillian Drummond, an Austin community leader who began working with Cincotta's Organization for a Better Austin in 1967, was still organizing in her community another half century later. "I help people of all races, and this is very important to me," she explained. "I was put here to do God's work and that's all I can do — for as long as I can." She died earlier this year at 104.
When Gale Cincotta died of gallbladder cancer on August 15, 2001, organizer Joe Mariano stepped in as interim director and chose three "strong women" — the Black Ohio-based Inez Killingsworth, white Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement (Iowa CCI) Brenda LaBlanc, and Mexican-born, Kansas-based Emira Palacios — to share the leadership. Killingsworth had already led the Union-Miles Community Congress to great success in Cleveland by wielding the CRA. Disclosure reported: "Cincotta always believed in elevating the power of women and thus three women from different backgrounds, but with the same beliefs, now make up the NPA leadership team.”
Today People’s Action Institute (formerly NTIC) and People’s Action (formerly NPA) is led by Sulma Arias, an immigrant from El Salvador, and Kansas resident. The chairs of both boards are Latina and Black, respectively. Together they are leading an organizing revival that Arias calls “the antidote to authoritarianism.”
A Nod to ACORN
A Cash on the Block review without naming ACORN would be missing a critical piece of the picture. ACORN and NPA were the twin powerhouses of 1970s and 1980s neighborhood organizing. ACORN was not primarily a reinvestment organization — as historian John Atlas notes, "it wasn't born as a bank watchdog and didn't intend to limit its focus." But ACORN's bank campaigns helped recruit more members and media attention for its other work: raising the minimum wage, unionizing fast-food and home health care workers, registering low-income people and people of color to vote.
ACORN registered approximately 1.1 million new voters nationally between 2003 and 2004 — work that likely helped Democrats win control of the House and Senate in 2006 — and helped raise the minimum wage in six states. By 2008, ACORN's membership had grown to 400,000, and the organization was actively fighting the foreclosure crisis. The Bush White House leaned on US Attorney David Iglesias in New Mexico to manufacture voter fraud cases against ACORN; when he refused, he was one of eight US attorneys fired in December 2006. Then came the doctored ACORN videos in 2009 — "a crudely doctored fake," as Satter puts it — and within weeks, Congress had stripped all federal funding from the organization. The nonpartisan Congressional Research Service found no evidence ACORN had perpetrated voter fraud, but the organization could not recover. It shut down in late 2010. NPA survived this same era, but barely, and only because the organization was forced to rebuild itself. Today we see these same attacks leveled against community and worker organizing groups that oppose the “dehumanizing values” of big corporations, the wealthy, and those committed to white minority authoritarian rule.
The Lessons That Travel
Flip back to the four principles that Satter spotlights from King and Carmichael-Hamilton. Write them down tonight — Satter shows across Cash on the Block that those 1967 principles were right then, are right now, and have never been tried at the scale they demand. To those four, drawn from NPA's actual practice, I would add a fifth: brilliant tactics without disciplined interracial organizing and coalition-building will not survive the next financial crisis, the next authoritarian administration, or the next decade of right-wing attacks.
Satter ends Cash on the Block by pointing out what NPA's victories were not: "Although reinvestment activists' successes were partial at best, there are lessons to be learned from this history." The S&L crisis of the 1980s cost taxpayers $124 billion — more than the Marshall Plan that rebuilt Europe after World War II — and "by 2011 not one senior executive of a major financial firm had been charged or imprisoned for their role in the subprime fiasco." The bank lobby still "exerts an influence over Congress" that "surpasses the power of any other regulated industry." The "double penalty" Cincotta and Bradford named in 1992 has only gotten worse:
The thrifts “followed the lure of huge profits in … new real estate developments, energy loans, and junk bonds—and the loans failed.” Meanwhile, “small towns, inner cities, and minority communities have continued to decline—starved for private capital and dependent on the dwindling resources of government welfare programs.” Now, “the federal government has borrowed against the future of their children to rescue the bankers who already abandoned these communities in their time of need,” they concluded.
But NPA's bet was always that organizing could shift the balance. NPA’s "Land Shark" protest at the Federal Reserve in April 1980, borrowed the Saturday Night Live costume and stationed the Land Shark above the entrance to force a meeting with Paul Volcker, is now the stuff of legend. Volcker eventually agreed to join the protesters outside — "only if the Land Shark came down." That is the creativity, energy, and discipline we need today.
As CCI’s LaBlanc said, "Democracy is … a promise and not yet a reality." Cash on the Block is a reminder that those rights have been used — and the people who used them best were working-class, multiracial, women-led, faith-rooted, and refused to treat their neighbors as the enemy.
We found the enemy in 1972. We found him again in 2008. We are finding him again now. The banks, the hedge funds, the private equity landlords, the crypto bros, the tech companies, AI billionaires, the corporate-conservative right, the Christian nationalists, the white supremacists, the authoritarians — they are still trying to convince us that the problem is each other.
Gale Cincotta's call, half a century later, is still loud and clear: We found the enemy, and it's not us.
James Mumm is a longtime community organizer who consults for 22nd Century Initiative, People's Action and organizations.
