STUDIES IN AMERICAN CINEMA

"What's Past is Prologue..."

STUDIES IN AMERICAN CINEMA: 
Studio Art 10C
University of California, Irvine
Fall, 1994

The Gangster Ethos: The Cinematic Portrayal of Organized Crime, Violence and Corruption 
in American Society, 1930-Present

by Kofi Natambu

[NOTE: The following excerpt is from a reprinted essay and lecture on the films The Godfather (1972) and The Godfather, Part II (1974) and their intertextual relationship to the social and cultural reality of gangsterism & organized crime in the U.S. from 1945-1975]

The following complete film is divided into 26 separate video segments...

VIDEO: https://www.youtube.com/watch…

In the first two ‘Godfather’ films (a third was produced in 1990) director-writer Francis Ford Coppola (b. 1939) provides us with a stunning social critique and cultural analysis of 20th century American life through a visionary use of fictional narrative and cinematic techniques that both depend upon, and deeply question, the received meaning of Hollywood conventions in the gangster film genre. One of the most significant results of this bold reinterpretation of conventional aesthetic representations is a multidimensional analysis of such powerful symbolic and mythical material as the American immigrant experience; the role and impact of the patriarchy on the American family; the disturbing relationship between organized religion and economic materialism in U.S. culture; the reality vs. the mythology of the ‘American Dream'; and the central place of crime, corruption, violence and hatred (racial, gender, sexual and class-based) in contemporary American society.

The highly distinctive manner in which Coppola and his outstanding team of film technicians and artists approach this historic and thematic material is a testament to Coppola’s incisive knowledge and understanding of the social and cultural period that his films investigate (i.e. 1945-1985). It is this profound insight into the implications of these issues for not only the gangsters but also the general population in the United States that audiences readily responded to when these films were first released in the 1970s.

What is most innovative about Coppola’s cinematic portrayal of actual social and political history is his frank and penetrating discussion of how the Mafia emerged and evolved in the United States in this century. In fact, the ‘Godfather’ series of films can be read as a trenchant commentary on how the cultural traditions of gangsterism have influenced our contemporary ideas about politics, economic power, and masculinity (male identity). What these films also make clear is exactly how and why these distorted yet respected values have created a major crisis in a society and culture addicted to various forms of self-destruction. What Coppola reveals is that the drug of capitalist exploitation and America’s self image are mutually dependent on each other. As Michael Corleone puts it in The Godfather, Part II (in response to the ethnic and ‘moral’ put-downs of a corrupt WASP politician named Senator Geary): “We are all part of the same hypocrisy.”

However, what even Michael fails to grasp or honestly admit (denial and willful self-delusion also being typical American responses to painful truths) is that this hypocrisy and lethal dishonesty not only applies to his ‘business’ (which is the corporate business of merciless and ruthless capitalist profiteering), but also to his personal family. This neurotic inability or refusal to see that the “personal is the political” or that one cannot separate one’s individual ethics and morality from that of the entire society because one supports and reinforces the other is at the center of the dilemmas expressed and examined in the films. Not surprisingly this contradiction and delusion haunt the attitudes, values and behavior of many other Americans besides gangsters.

In both ‘Godfather’ films we get almost a chronological examination of how the major criminal syndicates in this country began to consolidate their collective power in 1946 when crime boss Charles “Lucky” Luciano was pardoned from a New York State prison and given his conditional release by the federal government. The condition the government stipulated was that Luciano be deported back to Italy. However by this time Luciano (with his top lieutenant Meyer Lansky acting as emissary) had already done an important series of ‘favors’ for the feds during World War II (1939-1945), including working with U.S. Naval Intelligence in 1942-43 in providing much needed security for merchant vessels and troopships departing for England and other ports beyond the Atlantic ocean. Since New York was the single busiest port in America, the government and U.S. military were greatly concerned that thousands of men and millions of tons of war materials would be sabotaged and sunk off the east Coast by German Nazi U-Boats (they had already suffered major losses of both men and material in the previous year when spies who had learned the secret sailing schedules along with other crucial data helped the Nazis destroy the vessels).

In response to this crisis the government and the military both assumed that the Mafia controlled the International Longshoreman’s Association of the Port of New York, one of the most powerful unions in the country. Thus the commanding officer of the Third Naval District concluded that the best way to improve security was to win the cooperation of the ILA. Thus in the spring of 1942 the head of Naval Intelligence operations called on the New York District Attorney for help with the gangsters running the union. The D.A. got in touch with Joseph “Socks” Lanza, a small time hoodlum and boss of the Fulton Fish Market on the East River. Lanza was a minor figure in the criminal syndicate however and could not do much so he referred the government officials to Luciano. It was Meyer Lansky who conveyed the government’s message to Luciano and secured Luciano’s agreement to do whatever he could on behalf of the war effort. Lansky in turn worked diligently as Luciano’s emissary to the ILA union leadership. Luciano also granted the U.S. government one other major favor: He saw to it that his Sicilian Mafia paisanos (who were chieftains of notorious village gangs in Sicily, Italy) gave the American and Allied military forces quite valuable paramilitary assistance and support when their troops landed there in September, 1943.

Officially, all the government and military people involved in these deals with Luciano--the D.A. , Governor Dewey, the Navy--denied making any promises or consenting to any “arrangements” with Luciano though they naturally told him his contributions to the war effort would be “taken into account” when he appealed for clemency or parole for his thirty year sentence (Luciano was tried and convicted in 1936). In 1945 Governor Dewey (who as former New York State D.A. had been responsible for putting Luciano in jail in the first place) handed Luciano’s petition for release to the State Parole Board. The Board in turn recommended that he be rewarded(!) for his tremendous help in “defeating the Axis Powers (e.g. Germany, Italy, Spain, and Japan), and for his exemplary behavior in prison.” Since the government was full of gratitude to those who helped win the war no one in political or legal authority objected when Gov. Dewey accepted the Parole Board’s recommendation and had the notorious Luciano pardoned. It was only then the feds stepped in to declare that Luciano’s pardon was conditional: Luciano had to return to his native Italy for the rest of his life.

However it became immediately clear when Luciano left prison in January, 1946 and was taken to a Brooklyn pier where a ship was waiting to take him back to Italy, that his power as a major gang syndicate leader was still virtually intact. In fact Luciano was given an elaborate and festive party at dockside with only his most intimate and loyal criminal assocaiates present (including the ever present criminal mastermind, friend, and partner Meyer Lansky). Everyone assumed (correctly) that even if Luciano was not allowed back into the United States that he could control his now international criminal empire from Cuba. A year later in February, 1947 Luciano did enter the tiny island nation of Cuba, just ninety miles off the coast of Florida, where he and his criminal partners were given carte blanche by the corrupt Cuban government (under the auspices and control of the Cuban president, the dictator Fulgencio Batista) to openly build massive illegal enterprises like gambling casinos, prostitution rings, loan sharking, political bribes, extortion and racketeering. In return for allowing this rampant criminal activity to flourish the gang syndicate gave the government a healthy slice of the profits.

It is in this complicated historical context that The Godfather, Parts I & II are to be properly understood and examined. What happens after Luciano and his gang syndicate colleagues set up shop in Cuba is key to following the general narrative structure of both films. What Coppola and co-screenwriter (and novelist of the Godfather series) Mario Puzo did is establish a series of composite characters who symbolize in mythical and metaphorical fictional terms the major real-life gangsters who dominated organized criminal activity in the United States after 1945. Thus the Corleone family, led by the first ‘Godfather’ Don Vito (Don being a Sicilian term for Chief) and played magnificently by the legendary actor Marlon Brando (then only 47 years old under all that makeup) represents figures like the notorious Frank Costello, Carlos Gambino, Lucky Luciano, and others who formed the ‘Family’ network of criminal gangs that were based loosely on the village cell-like structures that had ruled with an iron and bloody fist for hundreds of years in Sicily, Italy. It was the ‘Five Families’ (each with their own geopolitical and economic ‘territories’ throughout the East Coast--in New York, New Jersey, Philadelphia and Boston, etc.) that controlled the national gang syndicate by dividing power, capital and influence over a very broad range of criminal activities among various other geographical regions of the country.

In this structure each large ‘Family’ unit had their own ‘soldiers’ (called capo) who took care of the dirty work of the mob (i.e. murders, beatings, physical threats, etc.), carried out extortion and racketeering activities in the unions, race-track betting establishments, and hotel, trucking, and restaurant industries etc.); maintained control over the extremely lucrative numbers racket and served as ‘enforcers’ and protection for prostitution and police payoff rings. As the Godfather films point out this structure is strictly hierarchial and authoritarian, with the upper echelon leadership, consigliare or attorney/advisors, and family ‘team captains’, like the film characters Tessio and Clemenza, giving orders to paramilitary underlings, etc. while the various ‘Dons’ rule the general family units by determining, in consultations with their lieutenants, all necessary strategy, goals and policy within the hierarchy.

In the postwar period 1946-1960 that the two films focus upon (with elaborate flashback references to the ‘immigrant era’ captured in Part II being from 1900-1930) we also get to see parallel fictional accounts of the real wars between family groups in New York that occured with some regularity in the late 1940s and early 1950s before Congress, under the tenacious leadership of Senator Estes Kefauver from Tennessee (who chaired the “special Committee to Investigate Organized Crime in Interstate Commerce” began to hold open public and televised hearings from 1950-1952 to expose how these national gang syndicates were operating, as well as where and under whose specific leadership.
These films also take us into the fascinating stotry of the ‘Cuban Connection’ and the subsequent revolution led by Fidel Castro and Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara that successfully overthrew the American-backed corrupt dictatorship of President Fulgencio Batista on January 1, 1959 (an extraordinary event that is brilliantly depicted in Godfather, Part II). The film also takes us into the real historical backstory of the rise of Las Vegas in the early 1950s and the crucial role of Meyer Lansky (who is depicted as the composite character Hyman Roth, in another outstanding performance by the Actor’s Studio co-founder, the legendary Lee Strasberg). The meaning of this latter history will be chronicled and examined in next week’s lecture...

Lecture excerpt by Kofi Natambu
Film Course, Studio Art 10C
University of California, Irvine
Fall, 1994
The Godfather Part 2 (1974):

The following complete film is divided into 26 separate video segments...

VIDEO: https://www.youtube.com/watch…

youtube.com

The Godfather II 1

Dr. Beryl Satter And Darnell L. Moore On the Insidious Racial Politics of Real Estate, Segregation, National Housing Policy, And Gentrification on Urban Spaces And Their Direct Impact On the Violent Oppression and Exploitation Of African Americans in the U.S.

http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/26015-the-price-of-blackness-from-ferguson-to-bed-stuy

“This is what happens when you have massive racial change in a community and the power structure remains in the hands of whites and the police force acts as this sort of mediating force between the white power structure and what is now a black community and has very little empathy or knowledge about that community.”

--Dr. Beryl Satter 

The Price of Blackness: From Ferguson to Bed-Stuy
Friday, 05 September 2014
By Darnell L. Moore,
The Feminist Wire | Op-Ed
 

The unsettling image of the lifeless body of 18-year old Mike Brown, the unarmed teen shot six times by Officer Darren Wilson, which laid prostrate before family and neighbors for hours in a pool of blood in the sweltering summer heat in Ferguson, MO, will surely haunt the collective conscious of the US for years to come.

Mike Brown’s murder, and the brutalizing way his killing was turned into a public spectacle, has much to do with the ways Black lives are literally and symbolically devalued in neighborhoods throughout the US The image of his lifeless body publicly displayed on the street is a heartrending reminder that Black bodies in the US are rendered valueless—so much so that even in death, particularly the kind sanctioned by the state, Black people, like Mike Brown and his family, are not afforded the right to humane treatment.

When commenting on the demographic changes in Ferguson for CNN, Beryl Satter, author of Family Properties: How the Struggle Over Race and Real Estate Transformed Chicago and Urban America, noted, “This is what happens when you have massive racial change in a community and the power structure remains in the hands of whites and the police force acts as this sort of mediating force between the white power structure and what is now a black community and has very little empathy or knowledge about that community.”

Ferguson, like many municipalities across the US, has experienced a dramatic shift in its racial composition. The municipality of roughly 21,000, which, according to the US Census, was comprised of a majority White populace (73.8%) in 1990, is now home to a majority Black populace (67.4%). Ferguson, thus, is more than the subject of a black teen’s death. It is the product of over five decades of “white flight.”

Changes in the racial composition of towns precipitate changes in the ways Black bodies are policed and valued in many neighborhoods. Anti-blackness—as evidenced through the enactment of inequitable laws, discriminatory policing practices, and economic exploitation disproportionately impacting Black people—is one of the threads that connects an individual tragedy, like Mike Brown’s death, to the broader structural issues of White racial supremacy, global capitalism, and gentrification impacting Black people and the working poor to middle class communities they hail from across the US Black lives and White lives are differently valued and are, therefore, differently impacted under the conditions of White racial supremacy across the country.

My brief time in Ferguson prompted me to consider the many ways Mike Brown’s death, and life, was warped by the structural conditions mentioned above—all emanating from what scholar George Lipsitz aptly calls the “possessive investment in whiteness.” Such investments in whiteness, which impacts everything from access to housing markets to points of educational access for Black people within communities across the country, must also be considered alongside the mundane incidents of police violence and hyper criminalization in the US.

Black death at the hands of the state is a consequence of the precarious structural conditions restricting Black life from Ferguson to Flatbush, Brooklyn. Flatbush is the neighborhood where 16-year old Kimani Gray was shot and killed by NYPD in March 2013. I live a short distance from Flatbush, in neighboring Bed-Stuy. Unlike Ferguson, which was a predominantly White space that experienced a decrease in its White populace, traditional black neighborhoods like Bed-Stuy are now experiencing an increase in its White populace.

Bed-Stuy is evidence that the investment in whiteness and divestment in blackness shapes the conditions in which Black bodies engage, and are engaged in, geographical spaces. White bodies in Bed-Stuy now seemingly signals safety and welcome, which is to say: White folk who would not otherwise perceive “Do or Die BedStuy” as safe and welcoming begin to finally perceive it as such because of the presence of other White people. Race shapes perceptions of space.

The problem with this misperception has less to do with the brutal truth that Black spaces like BedStuy or Ferguson are typically deemed “the hood,” as spaces that lack or are wholly violent until White folk increasingly begin trekking into, or back into, the very communities many people, white/black/brown/otherwise, imagined as terrifying. The more insidious problem is the belief that whiteness at all times and in all places signifies safety and bounty and, therefore, represents a site of investment: new stores selling expensive items begin emerging; the same stores stay open (the doors and not just side windows) twenty-four hours; realtors finally begin to take an interest in property sales; nameless and faceless “investors” begin leaving cheap flyers on stoops or in mailboxes promising cash for homes. Safety becomes a relative experience when gentrification occurs. The presence of White people almost always guarantees the increased presence of resources, like police, which does not always guarantee safety for Black people in those same spaces.

And here is what distinguishes the movement of White people into Black and Brown spaces from the movement of Black gentrifiers into those same spaces. Those Black folk, like me, who are afforded the privilege of choosing some of the locations we live are still considered valueless bodies in the same spaces we gentrify. Our presence does not always bring healthy food stores, cute eateries, and hospitable police; on the contrary, we are embattled by the very structural forces of White racial supremacy and capitalism that actually benefit White gentrifiers. And some of us might easily be stopped by police, harassed, or even shot whether we appear respectable or not in those same spaces.

So, if we are to ensure the end of state-sanctioned violence against Black people, we must be ready to think through and redress the socioeconomic and class underpinnings of anti-blackness and White racial supremacy. Until we do, whether we are bodies left to die without compassion in the streets or bodies read as deficits in communities across the US, Black people will continue to be treated as something other than human as whiteness continues to function as a sign for possession and asset.


This piece was reprinted by Truthout with permission or license. It may not be reproduced in any form without permission or license from the source.

http://us.macmillan.com/familyproperties/berylsatter

 

Family Properties: Race, Real Estate, and the Exploitation of Black Urban America
by Beryl Satter
Metropolitan Books (Henry Holt and Company)
2009
 
How the Struggle Over Race and Real Estate Transformed Chicago and Urban America

“Gripping . . . This painstaking portrayal of the human costs of financial racism is the most important book yet written on the black freedom struggle in the urban North.”

 —David Garrow, The Washington Post

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. In this powerful book, Beryl Satter identifies the true cause of the city’s black slums and the ruin of urban neighborhoods throughout the country: a widespread institutionalized system of legal and financial exploitation.

BERYL SATTER
(b. 1959)

Part family story and part urban history, Family Properties is the riveting account of a city in crisis, involving unscrupulous slumlords and speculators pitched against religious reformers, community organizers, and an impassioned attorney—the author’s father— who launched a crusade against the profiteers. Satter shows the interlocking forces at work: the discriminatory practices of the banking industry; the federal policies that created the country’s shameful “dual housing market”; the economic anxieties that fueled white violence; and the tempting profits to be made by preying on the city’s most vulnerable population.

A monumental work, this tale of racism and real estate, politics and finance will forever change our understanding of the forces that transformed urban America.

BERYL SATTER

Beryl Satter is the author of Each Mind a Kingdom and the chair of the Department of History at Rutgers University in Newark. She was raised in Chicago, Skokie, and Evanston, Illinois, and is a graduate of the Harvard Divinity School and the Yale American Studies program. For her work in progress on Family Properties, Satter received a J. Anthony Lukas citation. She lives in New York City.

http://www.blackpast.org/perspectives/race-family-and-real-estate-beryl-satters-family-properties

Race, Family, and Real Estate: Beryl Satter's Family Properties -

See more at: http://www.blackpast.org/perspectives/race-family-and-real-estate-beryl-satters-family-properties#sthash.Xk38QzVK.dpuf

In her new book, Family Properties: Race, Real Estate, and the Exploitation of Black Urban America (2009), historian Beryl Satter puts a human face on the often told story of racial discrimination in urban housing by following the career of her father, Chicago attorney Mark J. Satter, who was both an ardent defender of his mostly black clients who had been severely exploited by real estate speculators, and a property owner in an increasingly black neighborhood who some later accused of being a slumlord himself. Her account is a cautionary tale that reminds us that the ghettos of America's largest cities are the consequence of large impersonal economic forces and of hundreds of individual decisions driven by self-interest and, on occasion, by selfless motives as well.

Family Properties deals with one of the most contentious questions of recent American history –- why so many urban neighborhoods changed so rapidly from white to black, and then decayed into slums. Yet the book originated in something very personal -- my curiosity about my father, Mark J. Satter.

He was a Jewish Chicago attorney with a largely black, working-class clientele. He was 49 years old when he died from a heart ailment in 1965; I, the youngest of his five children, was six. As I grew older, I picked up oddly mixed messages about him from my relatives. They told me he had been a well-known crusader for the oppressed. But they also spoke in more whispered tones about properties he had owned in what was now a black ghetto. He’d hoped that they would provide for his family. Instead, they had become worthless. They were sold shortly after his death. By then they were worth so little that their sale hadn’t even covered that winter’s coal bills -- and I understood that somehow, my relatives felt that he was to blame.

There was a mystery here, and so, a decade ago, I finally decided to investigate my father’s story. I began by reading my father’s papers, which had been saved by one of my brothers.

I was shocked by the stories they contained.

I learned that my father had represented scores of African-Americans who had been unconscionably mislead and grossly overcharged by the real estate agents they’d turned to for help in buying homes. A typical example: in 1957 a white real estate agent, Jay Goran, bought a building for $4300. Soon after, Goran sold it to a black couple, Albert and Sallie Bolton -- for $13,900.

Goran never told the Boltons that he was actually the building’s owner. The Boltons signed some complicated documents that said that the building would remain the legal property of its current owner until they paid off the property in full. They made their high monthly payments for a year; they also spent a considerable sum for repairs. Then they missed a payment, and were evicted. Goran was now free to resell the property, keeping all that the Boltons had invested in it.

In part, the Boltons lost their home and their savings because of the policies of the Federal Housing Administration, which redlined -- that is, refused to insure mortgages -- in neighborhoods that contained even a few black residents. As urban historians have shown, FHA redlining made it impossible for most African Americans to buy homes with a mortgage. Instead, they were forced to deal with speculators, who bought low from whites and sold high to blacks. But these historians missed a critical point. Given that blacks could not get mortgages, how were they able to buy high-priced properties?

The trap that caught my father’s clients provides the answer. Unable to get a mortgage, the Boltons bought their building “on contract,” that is, on an installment plan. They made a down payment. They were also responsible for taxes, insurance, maintenance, and interest. However, they couldn’t get title to the building until the purchase price had been entirely paid off. With just one missed payment, the speculator could reclaim the building. If housing prices were inflated, a missed payment and subsequent quick eviction was practically guaranteed. And prices were wildly inflated. Speculators routinely sold to African Americans at double their properties’ values, but sale prices of triple to quadruple the properties’ values were not uncommon. The fact that approximately 85% of the properties sold to black Chicagoans were sold on contract – and that there were close to a million black people in Chicago by the mid-1960s – gives a sense of the scale of the exploitation.

Why were black Chicagoans willing to buy overpriced properties on contract? Consider the fact that between 1940 and 1960, Chicago’s black population almost tripled, from approximately 278,000 to 813,000. Most were squeezed into the South Side Black Belt -- a neighborhood that had been severely overcrowded even before World War II. Essentially, they were trapped. While homes were for sale at decent prices in nearby white areas, black people could not get mortgages to purchase property there. Landlords in surrounding white neighborhoods usually refused to rent to them as well. Those few black families who did escape the South Side ghetto and move to a less crowded white area were often attacked by their white neighbors, who would mass in front of their home, breaking windows and shouting death threats.

At the same time, black incomes rose nationally in the 1950s; the rise was particularly pronounced in Chicago, where tens of thousands of middle-income black people were paying high rents for inadequate spaces in the South Side Black Belt. Given this context, when a contract seller offered them housing outside of the ghetto, it made sense for them to grab it. Although the prices that the contract sellers charged were high, monthly payments often weren’t much higher than the rents that black families were already paying. Given the redlining policies of the FHA, buying on contract was one of the only means of escape from the high-rent, overcrowded ghetto.

But that didn’t mean that contract sellers weren’t wreaking havoc, fomenting racial division, and exploiting their black customers. “Blockbusting” contract sellers terrorized whites by going door to door, telling homeowners that “the blacks are coming.” If a white person’s house was worth, say, $8,000, they’d offer $7000 – adding that if the homeowner didn’t want to sell, the speculator would be back in month, but this time would offer $6500 – and if that wasn’t adequate, he’d offer the homeowner $6000 shortly after that. Facing this kind of pressure, the white homeowner would sell to the contract seller at $7000 – and the contract seller would then sell that property, on contract of course, to a black buyer – often a person of middle-class income – for, say, $15,000.

But even for a middle-income person, being forced to pay double or more than a property was worth hurt. In addition to being grossly overpriced, the buildings that contract sellers sold were often riddled with code violations. Some black buyers managed the payments and the high repair costs – others did not. And remember, if a contract buyer fell behind on even a single payment, he or she was out – the property reverted to the contract seller, who would resell it to another victim.

What happened to “racially changing” areas where contract sellers were active? While contract sellers became millionaires, their harsh terms and inflated prices destroyed whole communities. Because black contract buyers knew how easily they could lose their homes, they struggled to make their inflated monthly payments. Husband and wives both worked double shifts. They neglected basic maintenance. They subdivided their apartments, crammed in extra tenants, and, when possible, charged their tenants hefty rents. Indeed, the genius of this system was that it forced black contract buyers be their own exploiters.

The resulting decline of racially changing areas fed white racism. White people observed that their new black neighbors overcrowded and neglected their properties. Overcrowded neighborhoods meant overcrowded schools; in Chicago, officials responded by “double-shifting” the students (half attending in the morning, and half in the afternoon). Children were deprived of a full day of schooling and left to fend for themselves in the after-school hours. These conditions helped fuel the rise of gangs, which terrorized shop owners and residents alike. Ultimately whites fled these neighborhoods not only because of the influx of black families, but also because they were upset about overcrowding, decaying schools, and crime. They also understood that the longer they stayed, the less their property would be worth.

My father’s immersion in the heartbreaking details of his clients’ lives led him to embark on an impassioned crusade against Chicago’s real estate speculators – and against the white professionals, mortgage bankers, and politicians who enabled those speculators to thrive. He tried numerous cases against the city’s worst contract sellers, and gave countless speeches to any group that would listen denouncing their practices. At the same time he was also managing his own properties, four buildings that he had purchased in the 1940s and 1950s. All were located in Lawndale, a formerly Jewish neighborhood (my father was born and raised there) which was rapidly becoming black, and which also contained a high concentration of overpriced contract sales.

It was ironic but not surprising, then, that as my father urged others to protect their investments, his own deteriorated. He poured his money into maintaining the properties, but eventually it became nearly impossible to find either honest building managers or responsible tenants. His building managers stole from him. Some of the tenants they let in severely vandalized the property. The repair bills grew higher until they wiped him out financially.

Indeed, as my brother David later told me, that my father was “caught in his own trap.” When he rented to black tenants, he was called a “blockbuster.” If he were to refuse to rent to them, he would be a racist. Given his public posture, my father could not sell his buildings as blacks were beginning to move in; that would make him a hypocrite. If he sold after the neighborhood had become all black, he’d find no buyers except the speculators he was denouncing. Of course he would not participate in the plunder engaged in by these men and women. He decided to hold on, and try his hardest to maintain his properties while the surrounding area crumbled. But if his efforts to maintain them failed, then he was a slumlord. If tenants damaged the buildings, he would be called a slumlord as well.

Although the ironies were greater, my father’s situation differed little from that of any other white landlord in a “changing” urban neighborhood. Their choices were 1) to become contract sellers themselves; 2) to sell their property to a real estate speculator; or 3) try to “do the right thing” – that is, do what the liberals were preaching and stay in the neighborhood. But more often than not that meant to watch as one’s neighborhood became overcrowded, neglected, and crime-ridden, and to watch in horror as one’s property decline dramatically in value – until, defeated at last, the remaining whites exercised the one option that many of their black neighbors did not have – the option to leave.

My father died before he had to face the final indignity of selling his properties for nothing, but in the final months of his life, he suffered because of his powerlessness. There are lines from Herman Melville’s novel Pierre that perfectly express the tragedy of my father’s final year. Melville wrote that “in tremendous extremities human souls are like drowning men; well enough they know they are in peril; well enough they know the causes of that peril;--nevertheless, the sea is the sea, and these drowning men do drown.”

I had thought that my father’s untimely death in 1965 was also the tragic end of the battle against exploitative contract selling in Chicago. I would learn, however, that the battle he’d tried to ignite did finally take off -- but only after his death, when a black-led community organization called the Contract Buyers League arose to battle that practice. The struggles, losses, and ultimate triumphs of Chicago’s black contract buyers was a gripping drama that my father’s story led me to uncover, and one that would grant a measure of closure to what I had initially believed to be the tragedy of my father’s lonely battle.

Sources:

The above material is adopted from “Race and Real Estate,” a précis of Family Properties that was published in the July/August 2009 issue of Poverty & Race, the bimonthly publication of the Poverty & Race Research Action Council in Washington D.C. (www.prrac.org) and from the book Family Properties: How the Struggle over Race and Real Estate Transformed Chicago and Urban America by Beryl Satter. Copyright © 2009 by Beryl Satter. Reprinted by arrangement with Metropolitan Books, an imprint of Henry Holt and Company LLC.

Contributor(s):

Satter, Beryl
Rutgers University, Newark
See more at: http://www.blackpast.org/perspectives/race-family-and-real-estate-beryl-satters-family-properties#sthash.Xk38QzVK.dpuf

Have a Book and a Beatdown: Abuse of the Homeless in Detroit

Want a kick with that Karamazov? How about a shove with that Shakespeare? You can get that and more at the Detroit Public Library, just fall asleep inside. Oh, and be homeless.

By Patricia Calloway

It’s happening everywhere:

• In Toms River, N.J., five high-school students were charged with beating a 50-year-old homeless man nearly to death with pipes and baseball bats — throwing hockey pucks at him for good measure — as he slept in the woods.

• In Butte, MT, a 53-year-old homeless man was killed at a Greyhound bus depot because he refused to give another man a cigarette, according to court records. The man's skull was fractured by his attacker.

• In Spokane, WA, a one-legged, 50-year-old homeless man was set on fire in his wheelchair on a downtown street; he died as a result of his injuries. Police charged a 22-year-old man with first-degree murder in his death.

• In Nashville, TN, a homeless woman sleeping on a boat ramp was shoved into the Cumberland River, according to witnesses. Two men were charged with homicide in her drowning; authorities say the attack was unprovoked.

The homeless of America are under attack at record rates. According to the National Coalition for the Homeless, of 142 homeless people who were attacked in 2006, 20 attacks resulted in death. This was a 65% increase from the previous year, when 86 attacks resulted in the deaths of 13 people.

In its November 2008 study, "Hate, Violence, and Death on Main Street USA," the NCH documents that from 1999-2007, 774 acts of violence were perpetrated against the homeless. Of these violent acts, 217 resulted in death; the remaining 557 were non-lethal attacks, which basically means the victims didn’t die. These reports were collected from 235 cities in 45 states and Puerto Rico.

In Fort Lauderdale, FL, three men mercilessly beat a homeless man sleeping on a bench on a college campus with baseball bats, an attack caught on videotape.

In Los Angeles, CA, a homeless man was beaten with an aluminum bat as he slept on the sidewalk, an attack which cost him the sight in one eye and put him in a coma for three weeks.

And in Detroit, MI, a homeless man was kicked off a chair and onto the floor as he slept at Detroit Public Library by a DPL security officer. I witnessed that one personally.

A PERFECT PUMMELING

On March 7, 2009, I was doing research for a writing project at the Main Library when I looked up and saw a security guard approach a gentleman who appeared to be asleep in a chair. The gentleman was unresponsive to her attempts to rouse him from his sleep. I suggested to the guard that he may be on meds; many Detroiters are on prescription medications and this would explain his unresponsiveness.

After a few more attempts to rouse him from his sleep, and when she thought I wasn’t looking, the security guard delivered a low, quick side kick to the sleeping man’s legs, causing him to slide off his chair and topple over onto the floor. He landed on his head with a loud “smack!”. I cried out and ran to where he had fallen. The man never awakened.

And so it began.

“HE DRUNK”

Just as she delivered the kick to the man’s legs, the security guard looked up and saw me looking at her. This prompted her, like a guilty child, to walk toward me as I ran toward the man and explain to me that he was drunk (as if that could possible justify her kicking him). The man lay there on the floor, still unresponsive. After a few minutes he began to awaken, and then he sat up. I asked him if he was alright, did he need any help, etcetera. I was concerned because of the sound his head made when it hit the cement floor. He sat up and was talking and once I was satisfied that he was not seriously hurt, I went back to my seat where I could watch out of the way.

The security guard did radio for help, but, strangely enough, disappeared off the floor immediately after the incident. After another ten minutes or so, a male officer came to the area and stood watch while waiting for a second officer, who joined him near the man, who was still on the floor.

After twenty minutes or so of enduring his insults, the guards were able to get the man to his feet and escort him from the library. Yes, he did smell of liquor when he passed me. However, the sight of the guard kicking him onto the floor was so disturbing to me that I went home and e-mailed Uzoma Oenymaechi, Director of the Main Library, and complained bitterly about what I had witnessed. And what did I do THAT for?

GEE, THANKS. NOW BEAT IT.

Oenyamaechi assured me that it was not the library’s policy to pummel its patrons and that he would look into the incident and report his findings to me.

Approximately thirty days went by before I emailed him inquiring about the outcome of his findings. He assured me that he was still investigating and that he would get back to me with his conclusions.

Another thirty days went by without word from Mr. Oenyamaechi; I decided not to contact him, but to give him another 30 days.

Finally, one week short of 90 days after the incident, Mr. Oenyamaechi contacted me via email to report his findings.

WHATCHA TALKIN’ ‘BOUT, WILLIS?

Mr. Oenyamaechi informed me that he found no wrongdoing on the part of the guard in the incident of March 7, 2009. He stated that he found no impropriety in the way the incident was handled and that he had concluded that the guard did not kick him, that she only tapped his shoulder and that he fell getting up out of the chair on his own (presumably under his own power).

After playing “Blame the Victim” (supposedly the man made subsequent visits to the library where he was drunk and disorderly and had to be escorted out again), the library director claimed he had videotape of the incident which did not show the officer kicking the man. His investigation complete, he thanked me and encouraged my continuing being “an advocate for the less fortunate” (his exact words), and sent me on my way.

NO GOOD DEED GOES UNPUNISHED

I explained to Mr. Oenyamaechi that his investigation was flawed because he had not interviewed me, the eyewitness. I pointed out that no one confesses to something like assault, and that since the other guards arrived after the fact, they are flawed witnesses.

The other witness, the victim, was unconscious at the time he was assaulted; to this day he has no idea the guard kicked him out of that chair. He never got out of the chair, as the DPL director claimed in his email to me, because he was unconscious at the time. He fell out of the chair and went straight to the floor from the momentum of the security guard’s kick.

He explained to me that the videotape confirmed no wrongdoing.

I argued that I did not believe he viewed a videotape, because he would have seen what happened and contacted me to confirm what he saw. I offered to view the tape with him and show him how and where this happened. He claimed to have seen me on the videotape attending to the man, but claimed that he did not see the officer kick the man from the chair. I find that odd, very odd indeed.

As of this writing, I have not been interviewed by anyone at Detroit Public Library regarding this incident, and I am the eyewitness to the assault on this man. I have been available to make a formal statement regarding this matter since the day it happened, and continue to be available for interview. However, I doubt if I will be called; the Detroit Public Library feels it has concluded its investigation, glaringly obvious flaws and all.

WHAT’S GOING ON?

Michael Stoops, Executive Director of the National Coalition for the Homeless explains: "Homeless people are the newest minority group in America that is 'OK' to hate and hurt," he said. "It's as though, somehow, they're viewed as less deserving, less human than the rest of us."

Some homeless advocates say that city ordinances that restrict where the homeless can sleep, beg, congregate or bathe unintentionally reinforce the negative stereotype of homelessness and contributes to violence. It is this criminalization of homelessness that encourages the abuse. They are perceived as having no rights (because they are outdoors), which, in the mind of a social deviant, means they are unprotected under the law (since laws target the homeless specifically) and are therefore easy prey.

TURNING A BUCK: CORPORATE VIDEO EXPLOITATION OF THE HOMELESS

The CBS News magazine “60 Minutes”, in a story about the upsurge in violence against the homeless, reported on the phenomenon called “bum hunting”, in which teens stalk the homeless and hunt then down to be savagely beaten, sometimes to death. The NCH estimates that as many as 500 homeless people have died as a result of this “sport” since 1999. The popular video series “Bum Fights”, in which the homeless, some of whom are mentally ill, are bribed with liquor and small amounts of money to fight each other, light their hair on fire and hurt themselves on camera, has been named as the inspiration for many of these attacks by the actual perpetrators in court proceedings. The exploitation of the weak, powerless and homeless has become genuine home entertainment.

You haven’t seen anything until you have seen The Bum Hunter. The Bum Hunter is a sick parody of Steve Irwin’s Crocodile Hunter, only the Bum Hunter hunts bums.

He sneaks up on them while they are asleep, referring to them as “creatures” and “fine specimens”, then falls upon them and restrains them by duct taping (yes!) their feet, hands and mouths. Sometimes he rolls them over and makes remarks about their skin, hair, nails and once he opened a homeless man’s mouth (yes, he did!) to inspect his teeth on camera.

He then ransacks their buggies, carts and bags, holding them up and describing their contents to the camera.

What did the producer of “Bum Fights” have to say for his sorry, perverted self? And I quote:

“We’re merely exposing something that people didn’t know exists. I think it’s interesting. I can’t imagine what would make somebody do the things that Rufus [a homeless man paid by the producer in alcohol and a ten-spot to humiliate himself on-camera] has done to himself……..”

Not only could he not see why Rufus would do these things, he couldn’t see the connection between his videos and the upswing in violence against the homeless by teenagers, even though his videos were cited as inspiration by millions of teens who engage in bum hunting.

In 2004, nine national retailers, including Target, Borders, Blockbuster, Barnes and Noble, Tower Records, Best Buy and Amazon saw nothing wrong with selling these “Bum Hunter” videos in their stores or on their websites. After the NCH called these national retailers out for their exploitation of the lost and unsheltered in a Cleveland press conference, they immediately stopped selling them.

These videos have found a second life on YouTube, but then you knew they would, didn’t you? Check it out and be sickened.

DON’T HATE ME BECAUSE I’M INDIGENT

Should assaulting a homeless person be considered a hate crime? The Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors hate groups and their activities in the United States, certainly thinks so. According to The Intelligence Report, formerly known as Klanwatch, crimes against the homeless resemble hate crimes.

Brian Levin, a criminologist and hate-crimes expert at Cal State San Bernardino, says attacks on homeless people "fit the category like a glove" and should be punished as severely. He explains that hate crimes and attacks on the homeless bear an uncanny resemblance to one another: stereotyped victims, offenders who act on latent prejudices, offenders who seek thrills or feel superior to their victims (like, say, a uniformed security guard in a public library), and a mob mentality.

"And on all these points the attacks against the homeless are really indistinguishable from other hate crimes except for one difference — there are a heck of a lot more of them", Levin says.

According to the FBI, which has been collecting hate crimes data since 1990, between 1999 and 2005, 82 people were killed in the United States of America because of their race, ethnicity, or religious or sexual orientation.

There were 169 homeless people murdered-more than twice as many people-during that same period, the National Coalition for the Homeless says. In the next 2 years 56 more homeless people would be murdered on the basis of their lack of housing.

By 2007, 26 members of Congress had asked the GAO to determine whether attacks on the homeless can be classified as federal hate crimes, and six states, Maryland, California, Massachusetts, Nevada, Texas and Florida, put homeless hate crimes bills into their legislatures.

BACK TO THE STACKS

I don’t look at the incident of March 7, 2009 as a tragedy, because it’s not. I see it as an opportunity to inform the public about the seriousness of this problem that few people even think about. A society is judged on how it treats its lessers; its poor, its uneducated, its children, its elderly. Detroiters should know that their fellow citizens are being abused and mistreated.

The fact that the abuser, in this situation, is a municipal employee or perhaps a contractor, just makes it all that more difficult to understand.

Strangely enough, this is not the first time I’ve witnessed the callousness of a City of Detroit employee toward a homeless person.

IT’S DÉJÀ VU ALL OVER AGAIN

A little over a year ago, I was riding the Fort Street bus when a homeless man tripped off the curb into its path. He hit his head on the pavement and was knocked unconscious.

As a tiny but slow river of blood flowed from and puddled under his head, the bus driver remained behind the wheel of the bus while staunchly refusing to see about the man. “I don’t want to get sued”, she said. Instead of calling EMS, she called her dispatcher and told him she couldn’t move her bus because a man was laying in front of it.

She didn’t want to get in trouble for being late on her bus route, so she cleared herself with a DOT supervisor first. Myself and another passenger called EMS for him. She radioed for an ambulance, but only after we had already used our cell phones to call.

So when I saw the DPL guard kick the sleeping man, I knew I had a job to do.



WHEN YOU GET RIGHT DOWN TO IT

The recent collapse of the American dream has revealed the ugly truth, that a society that worships money, material possessions, youth and beauty is not so rich, accomplished, young and pretty after all, but a seriously deluded collective who must keep the hoax going by any means necessary.

The homeless are a staunch reminder of what a joke the American dream really is, how unattainable it really is and how quickly it can become a nightmare. We see how far and how fast one can fall after losing a paycheck, and our wage slavery becomes apparent. We feel cheap and gutless, like frightened whores standing in the rain.

The homeless reflect the truth about the society we live in, a society that would spend trillions of dollars killing people on the other side of the world instead of spending millions saving lives at home; the brutality of our socioeconomic system is oh so very obvious and becomes glaringly apparent, but we can’t stop worshipping it.

We can’t look at the homeless, lest we see who we really are. Besides, it might be catching, so wemust run away from it as fast as we can.

And maybe that’s it; maybe the sight of ourselves if not for the grace of God disturbs us on some primal level. We have to ignore them (us) and if that doesn’t work, destroy what they represent (our true selves outside of God’s mercy and grace) even if it means destroying them, period.

That is why the man at the Main Library ended up on the floor. He was appropriately feisty and belligerent toward the guards when he came to himself. I was relieved to hear from the library director that he had returned to the library, all piss and vinegar and insult and trouble, because it meant he had survived his fall and was alright. I’ve wondered in the 80 or so days since he crashed to the floor if he was okay.

Nothing is coincidence; I witnessed the injustice done to the sleeping man for a reason. Perhaps it’s because I’m like him, all piss and vinegar and insult and trouble, appropriately feisty and belligerent and unafraid to stand up and speak truth to power; maybe I’m the only one who could write this editorial not for the glorification of self, but in the hopes that it will spur someone to action and bring about a change.

And if that is so, then God’s mercy and grace has not been far from him at all; His mercy is my witnessing what happened and standing up for the homeless man, His grace, the man’s ignorance of what was done to him in the library that day.

God is good. All the time.

You can contact Uzoma Onyemaechi via email at uonyema@detroitpubliclibrary.org, or you can call him at (313) 833-1000. Drop him a line; let him know you read this and tell him what you think. I told him I would write this, so you won’t be surprising him. Go ahead, email the guy; after all, he, like the security guard, is a public employee.

Mr. Onyemaechi has this weird habit of referring to Detroiters who use the DPL as “customers”; I had to correct him on that. People who support libraries and other institutions through tax dollars are not customers. They are patrons; he and his employees are on the public’s dime. It’s that corporate crap they’re teaching to public institutions these days.

Go ahead, email him and let him know that in light of the foreclosure crisis that has touched every city in this country and the many families that have been displaced from their homes that you don’t appreciate his lack of compassion for our most vulnerable citizens.

There but for the grace of God go us all, and he can go, too. Tell him that.

Call Onyemaechi and tell him to respect the dignity of the homeless.


Patricia Calloway writes Citizen Pat’s Blog at
www.thepatshow.wordpress.com. She lives in Detroit, Michigan