Linda Gartz- Redlined

At a time when the home ownership gap between whites and African Americans is greater than it was during the Jim Crow era, it seems important to recall some of the historical roots that gave rise to such inequality. And at a moment when the administration in the White House is actually weakening standards that banks must meet when considering community investment rather than strengthening them, the need to reflect becomes all the more urgent.

In Redlined: A Memoir of Race, Change, and Fractured Community in 1960s Chicago, author and documentarian Linda Gartz employs a trove of found documents to illuminate her family's experience of "redlining"--the marking off of areas where banks avoided making investments based on community "demographics." While the Chicago suburb of West Garfield Park is Gartz's focus here, similar events unfolded in other cities across the North, where as white-majority communities began to be integrated, banks employed discriminatory redlining, with white flight, disinvestment and community decline predictably following.

One of the interesting aspects of Linda's story is the evolution of her family on the civil rights arc: they neither took up King’s call to action, nor did they support the racist cause. Like so many white, middle Americans scared of the unknown, Gartz’s parents were at first reluctant to allow their community to be integrated. Yet they remained as their white neighbors fled, came to befriend their new neighbors, and in the end made a significant donation of real estate to a local organization that supported the Black community. The resulting picture is one of growth and change. And unafraid of tackling challenging family history, Gartz also explores the taboo subject of mental illness and the changing sexual mores of a country undergoing the tectonic shifts of the 1960s.