the Contract Buyers League: The Beginnings of the CBL

Monday, April 15, 2013

The Beginnings of the CBL

In January 1966, Monsignor Jack Egan was assigned to Presentation Parish in North Lawndale by the newly appointed Archbishop Cody. Egan was a well-known priest in Chicago who worked tirelessly to maintain the church’s presence in the inner city and assist the urban poor. Looking back on his assignment to Presentation, he said “I’m living with black people for the first time in my life. Archbishop Cody couldn’t have given me a greater gift. I don’t think he thought of it that way. I think he thought he was getting rid of me.”1

While at Presentation, Egan visited seminaries to recruit students to come work with him on Saturdays. He assigned each seminarian a block in the neighborhood as their “parish”. They were to get to know everyone on that block, and then gathered in the afternoons to discuss what each had learned that day. They called this Operation Saturation. Jack Macnamara was one of those seminarians, and visiting his “parish” once a week was not enough. With Egan’s support, Macnamara and another Jesuit seminarian, Jim Zeller, received permission from their Jesuit superior to move to Lawndale for the summer of 1967 and continue this work.2

Macnamara and Zeller recruited college students to volunteer and live together in Lawndale for the summer to help organize the community. They listened to many problems that the residents were having, but nothing added up to an issue they could organize around. Until one resident confided in Macnamara about her struggles with making her monthly housing payment. Macnamara was stunned by the amount she owed each month, and knew that something was wrong. Around the same time, Ruth Wells went to Egan to ask what she could do about the fact that her seller wanted another $1000 when she had never been late or missed a payment over a ten year period. With the guidance of Egan and John McKnight, midwest director of the US Commission on Civil Rights, Macnamara and the college students began researching an 8-block area of Lawndale at the Recorder of Deeds, finding that the majority of properties in that area were sold on contract.3

They finally had an issue to organize the community around, and by January of 1968 the first community meetings took place to present this data. Out of these meetings was born the Contract Buyers of Lawndale, and later the Contract Buyers League when it expanded to include homeowners beyond Lawndale.

1 Satter. “Family Properties” 234.
2 Frisbie. “An Alley in Chicago” Ch. 17-18.
3 Macnamara, personal interview.

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Background Information

Historic Lawndale

North Lawndale, having transitioned from a largely Italian and Irish based population at its inception in the mid 1800s, emerged as a community largely dominated by a Bohemian and, nominally, Catholic population, particularly in the south end of the neighborhood. In the early 1900s, Lawndale transitioned again, rapidly becoming the third largest Jewish community in the world after Warsaw, Poland and New York City.

The strong Jewish presence began to animate much of the personality and architectural character of the neighborhood, with residents as notable as Golda Meir and Benny Goodman, and an architectural landscape with the largest concentrations of synagogues in the country and some of the first large theaters in the country. The industrial infrastructure was second-to-none and included Sears Roebuck and Co. and Western Electric. Following World War II, the neighborhood began a slow, then rapid transition to become the first African-American community on Chicago's west side. Notable residents included Dinah Washington and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Homebuyers

The Contract Buyers League consisted of working class African Americans who had arrived to Lawndale from the overpopulated black-belt on Chicago's south side in search of available housing. These same families had previously arrived to the south side from the segregated American South after World War I in search of industrial labor opportunities.

Exploitative Contract Selling

In racially changing neighborhoods across America, federally insured mortgages were unavailable, which left no other option than contract buying as a home purchasing method. The speculative sellers preyed on white homeowner's fears of plummeting real estate values associated with racially changing neighborhoods. The sellers bought homes from those white residents for well below-market value, and in turn sold those homes on contract to black homebuyers at highly inflated values. The terms of these contracts included maximum interest rates, all maintenance responsibilities, and the eviction of homeowners with total loss of investment for failure to pay at any time. Essentially, these contracts denied buyers the benefits traditionally associated with home ownership.

Collective Protest

When the contract buyers realized the unfairness of their home purchase, they attempted to renegotiate with their seller. This was essentially a case-by-case scenario. However, when only a few of these attempts resulted in re-negotiation, the CBL formed and began to picket the offices and homes of sellers, handed out pamphlets and flyers to the neighbors of sellers, filed a series of class-action lawsuits, collectively withheld payments, and resisted and dismissed eviction efforts.

CBL Legacy

The effects of the CBL had and continues to have both local and national implications. Nationally, these efforts gained an audience beyond North Lawndale and were a major contributing factor to national structural changes. This activity was one of several factors in Congress passing the Community Reinvestment Act, the FHA changing its underwriting policy, and the formation of the Gamaliel Foundation as well as the Jewish Council on Urban Affairs. Locally, one of three lawsuits filed on behalf of the CBL led to changes in the Illinois Forcible Entry and Detainer Law to allow for a broader defense in eviction cases. The two additional lawsuits filed by the CBL against the sellers lost in court, but led to contract sellers agreeing to renegotiate all of their contracts according to the CBL formula. While achieving renegotiation at a fair price was the main goal, quite possibly the greatest result of the CBL was the unification and empowerment of the community, and the lifelong impact that had on individuals involved in the CBL.