A League
of Their Own

With the help of some Jesuits and college students, Black homeowners on Chicago’s West Side raised their voices a little more than 50 years ago to fight the housing discrimination issue plaguing their neighborhood.

As a result, hundreds of families saved their North Lawndale homes, laws were rewritten, and a Jesuit seminarian named John R. “Jack” Macnamara found his life’s work.

In the Great Migration, hundreds of thousands of Black people from the South relocated to Chicago seeking a better life. But due to blockbusting and redlining, owning a home meant buying it on contract—a precarious arrangement at best.

“Blockbusting” involved white real estate speculators scaring white homeowners into selling their homes quickly and cheaply rather than staying put and seeing their neighborhood overrun by new waves of Black residents. The speculators then sold the very same homes to Black families, sometimes a week later, at double the price or more.

Redlining is the practice of excluding resources to control neighborhood populations. In this case, the Federal Housing Administration wouldn’t insure home loans to Black people, leaving prospective homeowners no option but to buy on contract. According to those contracts, buyers were responsible for all expenses and repairs to the home, and if they missed even one payment before the final payment was made, they’d lose the house. The speculator would then re-sell the house and start the process all over again.

Enter Jack Macnamara. In 1967, Msgr John “Jack” Egan invited Jesuit seminarian Macnamara, to oversee a community organizing project in North Lawndale. Hearing the homebuyers’ stories, Macnamara knew something was awry, and in January of 1968, the buyers, Macnamara, and others gathered for the first meeting of what would become the Contract Buyers League (CBL).

After years of meetings, pickets, protests, a payment strike, and many lawsuits—funded in part by donations from Jesuit provinces and private individuals Macnamara leaned on for support—about 450 homebuyers had renegotiated their contracts. Several dozen others had lost their homes, though, and according to a study co-authored by Macnamara and published in 2019 (about a year before his death), Black homeowners lost over $3 billion as a result of contract sales in Chicago from 1950 to 1970.

Macnamara eventually left the Society of Jesus, got married, ran a sausage company, and raised seven children. He also served as CFO at at Christ the King Jesuit College Prep on Chicago’s West Side and was a fellow at Loyola University Chicago’s Center for Urban Research and Learning. Through it all, he never lost his love for the cause he joined and led as a young seminarian. He also retained his connections to the people of North Lawndale. The day before he died in 2020 at age 83, he visited the neighborhood’s St. Agatha Catholic Church.

“My parents always stressed that we were blessed, and that we should use our blessings to work to build others up,” says Macnamara’s daughter Meghan Halleron. “I think my dad believed that the Jesuits were particularly dedicated to this mission.”

Also in attendance at CBL meetings were attorneys from the prestigious Chicago law firm Jenner & Block, including Tom Sullivan, John Tucker, Dick Franch, John Stifler, Carol Thigpen, Jeff Colman, and others, as well as several paralegals. For more than 15 years, the attorneys offered their legal services to contract buyers on a volunteer basis, renegotiating contracts for over 450 families and filing two federal lawsuits. Today, Jenner & Block is well-known for their pro bono work, and many of the attorneys remained lifelong friends with client members from the CBL.

Many others contributed to this movement, such as Sister Andrew, a nun who had 10 years of real estate experience before entering religious life, as well as numerous Black contract buyers, including Henrietta Banks, Charles Baker, Ruth Wells, and cochairman Clyde Ross.

The Contract Buyers League’s legacy is still felt today. The publicity generated by the cases helped bring about major housing reforms, both at the state and federal level. To say the group’s members came from different backgrounds would be an understatement. But above all else, they shared a commitment to fighting injustice, and in turn, made history.