Vol. 75/No. 32      September 12, 2011

“She opened the door for other people not to be afraid and to fight,” Sarahlynn Lewis, a sculptor and disabled Vietnam veteran who lives in the neighborhood, told the Militant. “This is happening all over. It’s not a color thing.”

In an interview, Ward said she has been living in her house, located in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, since 1967. Her fight to keep it goes back to 1995 when she responded to a flyer left in her mailbox from Delta Funding Corp., which was pushing subprime mortgages.

Ward says she received only a little more than $1,000 of the $80,000 loan she was promised. In 2000 Delta was sued for civil rights violations for swindling low-income house owners and targeting Black women, especially the elderly. As a result of the settlement, in 2001 Ward received a letter from Delta informing her that the mortgage would be cancelled. When Delta went bankrupt in 2007, however, she discovered that the mortgage had instead been bounced from bank to bank and she owed more than $200,000.

A real estate investment company, 768 Dean, bought the loan at an auction in 2008. The company foreclosed on the house in 2010 and stepped up harassment of Ward. She brought out a picture she took of a team from Adult Protective Services that came to her house. “When I saw the sun shining on the handcuffs, I jumped in the car and got away,” she recalls. APS is a program for “physically and/or mentally impaired adults.”

Retired New York City schoolteacher Richard Walker, a neighbor of Ward’s, said he has had to chase loan solicitors off his doorstep. “They prey on people.”  
 
 
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