Courtesy of Bradie Speller

By Michael R. Glass

Bradie Speller still remembers moving to Roosevelt as a nine-year-old. His parents, both born to sharecropping families in North Carolina, married in 1947 before migrating north to Brooklyn. For the next decade, his father toiled at two jobs: pressing sweaters during the day and driving a delivery truck for the New York Daily News at night. His mother also worked as a secretary. Even while raising three young children, they managed to save enough for a down payment on a house.“ What wound up motivating us to move from Brooklyn,” Speller recalls,“ was that the schools were too crowded.”

At the end of the summer of 1960, they stuffed the contents of their Brooklyn apartment into a U-Haul trailer, hitched it to the family car and headed east for the suburbs of Long Island. Eventually

Bradie Speller( left), with family in front of 1 Konig Court, 1960. they arrived at“ this house with grass and a fence around it.” Having grown up playing in concrete parking lots, Speller and his brothers now had an entire yard to themselves. For his parents, he reflects that 1 Konig Court, a two-story Cape Cod on a corner lot, embodied what he calls“ the Black middle-class dream.” By that he means“ they owned their own home, their kids could go to a good school and find a better life than they had.”

Historians have uncovered how, in the era of redlining, people of color bought houses under more exploitative terms than their white counterparts. Excluded from full citizenship in the New Deal welfare state, non-white homebuyers were denied the protections of the Federal Housing Administration and the Veterans Administration. Instead, they faced conditions of“ predatory inclusion,” with higher costs and more unsteady terms.

Much of this scholarship has focused on land installment contracts, an unconventional mortgage used by many Black and Latino homebuyers. Under this arrangement, the seller retained ownership until the buyer paid back the entire loan. Buyers who missed just one monthly payment could be foreclosed upon and evicted, sacrificing all their accrued equity. In essence, land installment contracts saddled buyers with all the burdens of homeownership, such as repairs and property taxes, without any of the benefits.

But land installment contracts were just one of many unconventional mortgages. To buy their house in Roosevelt, the Spellers assumed the outstanding mortgage from the previous white owners, Michael and Rita Tedeschi, picking up the monthly payments where they left off. To cover the rest of the sales price, the Spellers used a“ purchase money mortgage.” Most likely because they could not obtain a bank loan, the white couple lent them much of the funds. In effect, the Tedeschis acted as both seller and lender. The Spellers never had to apply for a loan themselves, thus circumventing the redlining policies of mortgage lenders and federal underwriters. They arranged a personal loan with the

16 FINANCIAL HISTORY | Winter 2026 | www. MoAF. org