The Color Of Money

This blog will focus on the lasting importance of Bill Dedman's piece that was first published in the Atlanta Journal Constitution on May 1, 1988 entitled The Color Of Money. This piece is monumental in that it exposed the truth that racial based discrimination was a covert practice among the banks and savings and loans in the Atlanta area. The depth of the data presented was both overwhelming and compelling, making this story rather lengthy. The ways Dedman dissects the banks and mortgage companies' own reports and statistics shows that even if it were not a deliberate attempt to ostracize the black community by denying home loans in predominantly black communities, the banks' failed to market their products in those areas and make themselves visible as a source for the purpose of home ownership. One of the reasons banks offered for the disparity was that they were not primarily in business to make home loans. While this may be true, the study also took into account mortgage companies that were owned by the banks and savings & loans in question. In the second story detailing how the study was conducted, the reader is informed on the steps taken to remove bias from the findings of the study. Since many of the reports considered for data purposes did not contain information on race, the study was conducted in a city where the middle class black population rivaled that of the middle class white popluation and only took into account areas where at least 80 percent of the residents were of one ethnicity or another. This gives us the truest sense of what the data represents. Regardless of the reasoning, the bottom line is that Blacks were not able to secure home loans from financial institutions at the same rate as whites, or in other words, black are denied at a much higher rate. This story was aided by the use of computers which housed the data with which all of the statistics were created, allowing us to see clearly into a problem that existed since this country's origin.