Editor's note: A version of this article ran in the Spring 2020 issue of Loyola magazine. The subject of the piece, Jack Macnamara, died at his home in September 2020 from complications of COPD and congestive heart failure. He was 83. Loyola University Chicago mourns the loss.

Consider the black Sketchers. The brown-rimmed glasses. The patchy wool sweater. The oxygen tube that snakes from his nose to a tank at his feet. Jack Macnamara is 83-years-old, with the gray stubble to show for it. He speaks and moves unhurriedly. At first glance, the visiting scholar at Loyola University Chicago’s Center for Urban Research and Learning (CURL) doesn’t project the image of a rebel, a fighter, a man willing to stir it up—over and over—for a righteous cause. 

But make no mistake: Macnamara (BS ’61, MA ’66) is a Loyolan of serious conviction, and a fair housing activist of the highest order. The news clippings and mementos papering his fourth floor cubicle in Cuneo Hall point to this legacy—as the chief organizer of the Contract Buyers League (CBL), an influential organization of African American homeowners that banded together in the late-1960s and early-1970s to fight racist, predatory real estate speculation on Chicago’s West and South Sides. Macnamara is still hammering away at the issue five decades later, using Loyola brainpower and resources to push forward scholarship on the segregation he set out to dismantle during the Daley administration (father, not son) and its snowballing consequences. 

Ask the most basic of housing policy questions and Macnamara will inundate you with sheaves of paper, of speeches delivered and meetings convened and solutions proposed. On the first day of her urban studies capstone class a few semesters ago, Fiona Kennedy (BA ’19) received a Macnamara handout that she described, tongue planted in cheek, as “passionate.” “He passed out a piece of paper that was 75 percent bold and italic letters,” she says. “Everything was capitalized!” His enthusiasm was contagious. “He’s been working on open housing his entire life,” Kennedy says. “He hasn’t slowed down one bit. I know a lot of people when they get into their older age, they lose the optimism of their 20s. They lose a little faith. Jack isn’t like that.”

Moving In

The exact date that Macnamara moved to Lawndale, on Chicago’s West Side, is emblazoned on his brain: June 1, 1967. He was 30, lanky and idealistic. He’d been raised just up the road in Skokie, Illinois, the oldest of five, and had graduated from Loyola Academy in the 1950s, when it was housed on Lake Shore Campus. At 18, he matriculated at Loyola, just as his father was developing cancer. Since his dad could not keep his job, Macnamara paired his political science studies with 40-hour weeks on the graveyard shift at O’Hare Airport, running the counter for Delta Airlines. Work never gave the young man pause. 

After a short detour to law school (which he quickly abandoned), Macnamara entered the Society of Jesus, studying theology at Bellarmine College. It was there, in North Aurora, Illinois, where Macnamara saw a presentation from Monsignor Jack Egan, a priest and social activist from Chicago. Egan was recruiting seminarians to help at his new post, Presentation Church on South Springfield Ave. The parish was home to 400 Black families, a filthy basement, and a finicky furnace. Egan hoped to find volunteers who could walk an individual block of Lawndale every Saturday, weekend after weekend, listening to resident concerns. At 3 p.m., they’d meet at the church rectory to debrief. Macnamara joined the initiative early and felt moved by the experience. In the spring of 1967, he got permission from his Jesuit supervisor to rent an apartment near Presentation. And so he moved, making himself a more permanent Lawndale fixture and altering the course of his life. 

Macnamara’s first order of business was unorthodox: He hired a “staff” of 10 college students, almost entirely white kids he’d met while teaching high school in Cincinnati during his Jesuit training. They crammed into their boss’s cockroach-infested unit and slept on bunk beds. He paid each $5 per week; proffered them with unlimited cigarettes; and sent them door-to-door in the evenings, once Lawndale residents had returned home from work. Their only stated task was to open their hearts and listen. 

“It was a scary place,” Macnamara says. “We were cautious, but it could be incredibly intimidating.” Complaints of every stripe flooded in; Macnamara describes the atmosphere as one of “total frustration” in Beryl Satter’s definitive history of Chicago housing segregation, Family Properties. What consistently startled him, though, was the amount of money Lawndalers reported paying towards their mortgages. The anecdotal figures seemed out of whack to the new organizer—sometimes double or even triple the amount his own parents’ paid for their place, up in Skokie. 
 

What accounted for the discrepancies?

Home sale contracts were often the only way Black families in FHA “redlined” neighborhoods could buy a home in Chicago during its post-war boom. Real estate speculators would purchase houses cheaply from whites moving to the suburbs, often after deploying sensational scare tactics about the inevitable Black takeover of their block. In short order, those same speculators would jack up the home’s price well above market value and sell it to a Black family eager to achieve the American dream. Contract buyers were then responsible for all repairs. They were also susceptible to speedy evictions (if monthly payments were late) and would receive zero equity in the home until it was paid off completely, usually decades later. Clyde Ross, a Mississippi native and taster at Campbell’s Soup, paid $27,500 for his first Lawndale home, in 1961. What Ross didn’t realize? The seller has recently picked up that same lot for $12,000. Three months after Ross moved in, his boiler blew out. He was on the hook for that, too. He later told Satter that he “felt stuck for life.” 

Before Macnamara’s team starting canvassing the West Side, he had no idea that simple real estate transactions were drastically different in the Black community. To understand the scope of the problem, Macnamara felt it absolutely necessary to “get the facts and do the homework.” He found a lawyer who could help him understand title searches, and then bunkered down for hundreds of hours in the basement of City Hall, mastering painful real estate legalese to uncover the true owners and prices of the buildings surrounding Presentation Church. It stunned him, the enormity and ease of the speculators’ profits, hidden in plain sight. “Once we did the research,” he says, “we had all the ammunition.” 

Ross was among the Lawndalers who started meeting at Presentation on Wednesday nights, tentatively sharing their own frustrations alongside potluck meals. Within a year, Ross was named co-chair of the newly formed CBL; its membership would balloon to 1,000. Macnamara’s own activism took on a missionary’s intensity. He’d routinely log 18-hour days, dropping weight at a worrying rate. “He’s going to kill himself the way he’s working,” a co-worker said at the time. “He looks terrible.” 

Satter’s book documents in arresting detail the drama of CBL’s multi-year struggle for renegotiated contracts and retribution. There were protests; bi-weekly picket lines; and a risky payment strike colloquially called “the big holdout,” in which 550 households risked immediate eviction by locking into a safety deposit box money orders for their monthly house payments. The Cook County Sheriff’s Office called CBL’s bluff, dragging people’s furnishings onto the street; CBL members dragged them back inside as soon as the deputies left. (Ross and others eventually met with Mayor Richard J. Daley, brokering a deal that temporarily halted evictions.) 

Allies emerged, stirred by CBL’s moral crusade. The Society of Jesus established a bond fund for eviction cases (eventually donating $250,000). Pro-bono attorneys initiated lawsuits. By the end of 1970, 106 contracts had been renegotiated, at an average savings of $14,000 per family. Another 350 would ultimately settle, for cumulative savings exceeding $5 million ($32 million in 2020). CBL won changes in the state’s eviction laws. The property histories CBL gathered to support their lawsuits, meanwhile, were used as support in legislation—the 1975 Home Mortgage Disclosure Act and the 1977 Community Reinvestment Act—that effectively outlawed the practice of redlining. 

The pressure and lack of privacy beat Macnamara down 50 years ago, that much he’ll admit. (For a stretch in 1969, he was hospitalized for exhaustion.) Even so, he considers his organizing with CBL “a humbling experience … and the most significant period of my life.” “I was being used as an instrument by God,” he adds, “doing his work.” 

Reengaging

In August of 1970, Macnamara attended the wedding of John O’Connor, a Catholic banker and trucking company owner who had steadfastly supported the CBL. The bride’s sister was a 23-year-old named Peggy, and Macnamara was taken with her. So taken, in fact, that he reversed course on his push for ordination three months later, releasing his vows and eventually marrying the woman of his dreams. Together the pair ran Fred Busch Foods Corporation, a sausage manufacturing company on North Milwaukee Avenue, for more than 30 years, and raised seven children. 

When he wasn’t casing and shipping summer sausages, Macnamara maintained the friendships he forged in the struggle, as best he could. He’d dial up Ross, catch up with Ruth Wells on occasion. Luceal Johnson—another CBL regular—welcomed Macnamara’s growing family into her home for Christmas dinner. In 1997, he helped orchestrate a 30-year CBL reunion, which brought together Lawndale residents and many of the former college organizers Macnamara had once trained. 

Yet it gnawed at him, this feeling of detachment from the complicated neighborhood he’d briefly called home. It wasn’t as if all of these midcentury injustices had been ameliorated, either—far from it. As Satter wrote in her conclusion to Family Properties, in 2008, “low-income African Americans in segregated neighborhoods remain subject to what my father referred to as the ‘million dollars a day cost to being Black.’” Living in the suburbs and working on the North Side, Macnamara felt like he’d “become numb to the crap that was going on in the community.” It was important for him to reengage. 

Two opportunities arose, back-to-back, in 2013. Out of the blue, Macnamara received an email from Ta-Nehisi Coates, then a respected (but hardly famous) writer for The Atlantic. Coates had found and devoured Satter’s book. Satter told Coates that Macnamara could connect the reporter with contract buyers willing to be interviewed. Macnamara happily obliged. The resulting article, “The Case for Reparations,” was a landmark piece of journalism, read and shared internationally. It later prompted a congressional hearing on the subject, at which Coates testified, and reinvigorated the reputation of the CBL. 

Before the article took shape, Macnamara was invited by Teresa Neumann—CURL’s operations manager and senior researcher—to speak with Loyola students about his experiences. In preparation for his campus visit, Macnamara pulled from his files an old spreadsheet that CBL used to circulate. It was first compiled in 1967, and it collated the markup that 20 separate homeowners paid for Lawndale homes they purchased on contract, simply because they weren’t white. (At the time, CBL called this the “Race Tax.”) At the bottom of the page was the concluding line item: $417,480, or $20,874 per home. It was a shocking figure at the time. Staring at the document with fresh eyes, Macnamara realized that he’d never calculated the collective loss, not across 20 homes but across the entire city. Had anyone attempted to total up the full scope of plunder? Over the subsequent half-decade, figuring out just how much was stolen legally from Chicago’s Black community became his new obsession. 

That research project took shape bit by bit. For assistance, he leaned on students from multiple universities, including a handful fulfilling their capstone requirement for Loyola’s urban studies minor, taught and overseen by sociologist Peter Rosenblatt (himself a housing expert). From a room in the Cook County Recorder of Deeds office, the group poured over land titles and court records from two federal lawsuits, some 50,000 documents in all. They also reviewed deposition transcripts and pleadings, and painstakingly examined property records. In the end, Macnamara felt comfortable identifying 3,027 properties (for which records survived) that were the subject of land sale contracts during the period in question, 1950-1970. Using the seller’s and buyer’s purchase prices for those isolated homes, they could extrapolate. “[The project] was always an interesting way for students to see how the larger white society is implicated in the ghetto,” Rosenblatt says, “both in creating it and in the lingering effects of it.” 

This past May, the group presented their findings at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. The cumulative figures were appalling: Black homebuyers in Chicago lost somewhere between $3.2 billion and $4 billion in today’s dollars because of racist real estate policies and predatory contracts, in those two decades alone. Black Chicagoans purchased 60,100 homesduring that stretch, over 75 percent of which were sold without a traditional mortgage, at an 84 percent average markup. Adjusted for inflation, Black contract buyers paid $71,000 more for their homes. Home equity is the main instrument for wealth generation in America, for better and worse. Macnamara does not hesitate to characterize the practice as “extreme expropriation.” 

Just as shocking was the percentage of families—an estimated 83 percent—who paid their contracts in full and on time, despite the onerous terms and conditions. Contract buyers were not irresponsible. They did what was asked of them. And for only the most superficial of reasons, they were stripped of what was theirs.  

The data-crunching students under Macnamara’s tutelage felt it was important that their activism not end with a symposium, powerful as that Fed presentation could be; the injustices they’d studied and illuminated were too expansive, too intense, and too cruel.

The data-crunching students under Macnamara’s tutelage felt it was important that their activism not end with a symposium, powerful as that Fed presentation could be; the injustices they’d studied and illuminated were too expansive, too intense, and too cruel. In discussions with Macnamara, they conceived of an organization they’re tentatively calling RESTITUTION Homes. It’s more concept than anything at the moment, still in its infancy. But it’s Macnamara’s next big project, and one that, if fully realized, he thinks could transform generationally plundered neighborhoods in Chicago and beyond. 

The seed of the idea was planted over breakfast not long ago, when Macnamara was breaking bread with Melvin Cox, a West Side developer with whom he was friendly. For years, Cox had worked in the mortgage department at Wells Fargo. How had Cox’s old employer defined a mortgage that was “affordable,” Macnamara wondered? According to Cox, it was the ability to pay 25 percent of one’s monthly income towards principal, interest, taxes, and mortgage insurance. 

Turning renters into sustainable home owners demands creativity. To Macnamara, the basic solution became clear: “If we started dealing with people who are in low-income situations and don’t have money for a down payment, we could bring them in and get them qualified for a mortgage that they can afford.” 

When operational, RESTITUTION Homes would manage a $1 billion “restitution fund.” Prospective home buyers from previously redlined neighborhoods could buy property using a voucher that covers the gap between the true market value of their purchase target and whatever mortgage commitment a bank determines they can comfortably make. (This is where Cox’s advice comes in.) 

The idea is ambitious—Macnamara is the first to admit it. But the societal debts we’ve inflicted are outstanding and grievously deep. In his watershed piece, Coates described reparations as the price Americans must pay to see ourselves squarely. “The recovering alcoholic may well have to live with his illness for the rest of his life,” he wrote. “But at least he is not living a drunken lie.” 

There’s a satisfying logic to Macnamara’s proposal, too. The value of the voucher would represent a sum comparable to the potential equity that was commandeered from earlier generations. (Something comparable to that $71,000 figure from the research project, in other words.) And the fund’s balance would be collected from a variety of public and private sources, including the state and federal governments, whose policies locked out Black homeowners in the first place. “The goal of this system of restitution will be revitalized community areas that are racially, ethnically, culturally, and economically diverse,” Macnamara writes in his RESTITUTION Homes primer, “with a sufficiently high percentage of owner-occupied homes to have community stability.” Predatory contract sales and other forms of real estate exploitation were by no means limited to Chicago, either; if successful, the model could be exported across the country. 

"I was being used as an instrument by God, doing his work.”

— JACK MACNAMARA

In 2019, Kennedy’s class spent the semester pulling information from the Cook County Tax Portal so they could compare the addressof West Side homes to the corresponding mailing address for the person who pays that building’s property taxes. The exercise was a way to estimate the historical impact of redlining and contract buying on a neighborhood’s home ownership rates. (Neighborhood stability is correlated with high homeownership.) Kennedy enjoyed the sleuthing, to be sure. But it was meeting Macnamara and thinking critically about urban policy that “changed the whole trajectory” of her career. Once destined for architecture school, Kennedy switched gears—she will enroll in a master’s program in urban planning at the University of Illinois at Chicago next year. 

Though the research is crucial for building his arguments, Macnamara is an organizer at heart, with limited patience for BS and with optimism to spare. His schedule belies his age—data collection, proposal papers, speeches, classroom visits. He comes to meetings prepared and leaves them energized. He harangues Jesuits, trying to drag them along with him, proselytizing about his findings. In October, he was paging through the Sun-Times and saw that the mayor’s office was establishing a task force to address affordable housing—his first reaction was to figure out how he could get himself appointed. 

Macnamara is a sharp storyteller who knows his way around a punchline or dramatic pause. His thoughts often drift back to his stint in Lawndale, the victories won and the pain endured. There were moments when he feared for his safety (the tension, the proximate violence) and considered throwing in the towel. But the job felt elemental, like something he was willing to die for. It still does, half a century later.