I began teaching in the History Department at the Ohio State University in 2003.

It was my first tenure-track job.

I was one of three people to join the History Department that year.

The other two new faculty members were white women,

and one, like me, was in her early 30s and was also from New York City.

That summer, when my wife and I moved to Columbus, we rented a townhome apartment about 25 minutes

from campus. It was a pleasant upgrade from the one-and-two- two bedroom apartments we had lived in since college.

But when my new colleague, the one my age from New York, moved to Columbus,

she moved into a trendy neighborhood just south of downtown in a house that she bought.

She explained that her father gave her the money to make the purchase. I thought must be nice because when I moved to Columbus, my father, he gave me a pat on the

back. Now that's not because he didn't want to give me more. He knew that homeownership was the way to build wealth.

He just didn't have the money to give.

My parents were social workers and owned their own home.

A row house in a black neighborhood in Brooklyn that they had purchased for $55,000 in 1981.

Some 20 years later, that house was their sole asset.

It was also the first property that my family had owned since my great-grandfather lost his land in Jasper County, Georgia.

He had been born during Reconstruction, but when he died at the hands of parties unknown in 1970,

his wife, my great-grandmother, had to leave the South and leave that land behind.

My grandfather grew up in Newark, New Jersey.

He never owned a home, not because he didn't try.

During the New Deal era, racial discrimination and mortgage lending

prevented him from securing the home loan he needed to purchase a house.

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