Word: forde
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...discrimination, and last week Cicero's town board finally agreed to change its ways. Bowing to a consent decree, the town will adopt a fair-housing resolution and eliminate its rule against hiring only residents for municipal jobs. Few observers were impressed. Said the N.A.A.C.P.'s Mel Ford Jordan: "It is an action consistent with 1860, which for Cicero is progressive." Town President Henry Klosak, noting that Cicero has been subject to federal, state and local civil rights laws for years, does not believe the decree will change much. All it did, said he, was put everything "down on paper...
...consumers finance everything from washing machines to vacations. The three auto giants all have financial subsidiaries that have become huge companies in their own right. With $75.4 billion in assets, General Motors Acceptance Corp. ranks among the largest U.S. financial institutions. In the past two years the assets of Ford Motor Credit Co. have grown 64%, to $31.3 billion, and Chrysler Financial Corp.'s assets have more than tripled, to $15.9 billion. Proclaimed Chrysler Chairman Lee Iacocca at last week's annual shareholders meeting: "We are no longer just a car company. We are a major financial institution...
...Vernon Ford went to Northwestern in 1964 to study and play basketball and became a black-power militant. Today Ford, 39, is living in the west-side Chicago neighborhood where he grew up. A nattily dressed real estate developer, he has a big house and two cars, one of them a BMW. But he has also kept the vow he made in college: to use his education as a lever to help other black people...
Taking an M.A. in sociology from Northwestern in 1970, Ford went west to law school at the University of California, Berkeley, because "I needed more credentials and equipment." After nearly three years of providing legal aid to welfare clients back in Chicago, he quit, frustrated by the low pay and disillusioned with the possibilities for creating change through the federal courts. He decided to go into real estate instead...
...Soon he was buying and renovating other undervalued houses as well. His neighbors were suspicious at first that he aimed to gentrify the neighborhood by selling to well-to-do whites, but in fact his customers have all been black families. "The real restriction of being black middle class," Ford says, "is that nobody has a place for you." By providing affordable housing, Ford has, in a literal way, given them a place. "We came from a protest generation," he says. "We didn't know how to get mortgages. What I thought we could do collectively, I did by myself...