This is the America, as I heard someone say, for the brave.
Zade sends repairmen, but the conditions of this house are beyond repairs. Inhabitable. As inhabitable as the apartment Johnson fled. Her appeals to the real-estate agency didn't reach someone with a heart. This is fast-buck land. Writes Taylor, the broker "reminded her that the problems in her house were now her own".
Johnson's attempt to achieve the "American dream" began, as Taylor notes, "the beginning of an American nightmare."
... For Janice Johnson. Otherwise, that American nightmare began in Africa, on whatever fateful day Johnson's ancestors were forced aboard a ship, forced to abandon home and offspring. Some white Americans had a dream. Of freedom.
A person can't ride your back, Dr. Martin L. King once said, unless it's bent.
It was the African-American women who brought about investigations of the ranks and file of federal officials, bankers, financial-mortgage companies, real-estate brokers, and appraisers. A group of black women resisters filed suit in Seattle charging this gang of profiteers with violating the 14th Amendment, among other things.
"Among the most courageous of the women who went public was Johnnie D. Brown," Taylor writes. A mother of six, receiving AFDC, Brown came down with an illness that hospitalized her for a week. To make matters worse, her welfare check was late, forcing Brown to miss paying the mortgage. Yet, she didn't give up; she sent partial payments for months.
Brown was trusting. She believed she had caught up only to come face to face with the free America. Brown, writes Taylor, had been "charged a $625 legal fee". And then things changed. Brown refused to pay! Marching off to a local attorney, she files a class-action lawsuit "on behalf of her and hundreds of other homeowners".
Marginalized, stigmatized, low-income; nonetheless, these black women exerted their power as a collective to effect change for the many brave black women forced to confront the injustice and indifference from an America free of their responsibility to others.
We don't need fictitious; we have history!
These African-American women asked questions. If your goal is to stand up, speak up, be human, you ask questions.
How is "fast foreclosures" of mortgages legal, let alone an example of justice? And what about the 14th Amendment's equal-protection cause? Were not "subsidized homeowners" being "treated differently from other homeowners when rapid foreclosure processes were initiated on their properties"?
HUD tried to have the case dismissed, but their efforts failed.
As Taylor explains, Brown's lawsuit "would remove the financial incentives for mortgage banks to remain engaged in the FHA market to the extent they had been".
End of story--no, not quite. That was history. And in Race for Profits, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor has done us well.
But the struggle continues because the capitalists regroup. They always do.
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