The Mass. Alliance Against Predatory Lending (MAAPL) and Community Partners Announce the Next Phase of State-Wide Campaign to “BRING OUR WEALTH HOME!”

Press Conference Features Homeowners and Community Leaders Speaking Out on Illegal Foreclosures, Targeted Predatory Loans, and the Fight for Justice and the Return of Wealth Illegally Taken from Our Communities.

Location:
Tent City, 130 Dartmouth St., Boston, MA

Date/Time:
Wednesday, December 30th, 2015
Gather at 10:30am – Press Conference at 11am!

Calling for a coming together, the African American community and other allies of color must lead efforts to reverse a massive attack on our community. This attack has been mistakenly identified as harm to individuals who were scammed into signing on to vastly overpriced predatory loans. We now know that black people and other communities of color (and then, women heads of household) were, in fact, targeted knowingly for these predatory loans by financial players across the world.

We believe, trust and know the time is “ripe for us to do right” as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said. We must come together and recognize this is no matter of some few individuals that bought “too much house”, but rather an intentional industry-wide creation of mortgages “that were doomed to fail,” as the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court has named them. Moreover, we know that these toxic mortgages were purposefully directed to our communities – with the purpose to strip them of equity, create instability and hasten the turnover of property from the long-term black residents to the investors who stood in the wings chortling in anticipation of what was to happen.

A Katrina without water is what happened. We have lost at minimum $12 billion in wealth and an untold disruption to family and community networks. We have been swindled. This is a Land Grab designed to rob us of our wealth, which we built from our labor. This is the newest version of an attack that has been waged against us in one iteration or another for more than four hundred years.

We expect our press conference to be during Kwanzaa – standing in the tradition of the Seven Principles of Kwanzaa, particularly Kujichagilia, Self-Determination, we call you to join us and fight back. At our press conference, we expect to have some homeowners who were directly targeted and illegally had their homes taken away due to foreclosures, and also have key community leaders to speak to this injustice and our organizing campaign to Bring Our Wealth Home. This is the beginning of what will be a much larger, coordinated community effort to launch and maintain our campaign to call it what it is – an illegal Land Grab – and address the injustice. When we have created the community-wide understanding necessary to support the people who must individually fight back, we will Bring Our Wealth Home that was illegally taken!

– Zakiya Alake, Union of Minority Neighborhoods, Inc. (UMN), liaison to Mass. Alliance Against Predatory Lending

857-251-0680 zakiyarox@gmail.com

WHEN WE FIGHT, WE WIN!