In the living room of her Detroit home, Cheryl West eagerly thumbs through her Bible. “I came across this verse last October,” she says, “just as my house was being sold at the tax auction.”

West sits in a plastic-covered antique chair that has been in the home almost as long as she has. She was eight years old when her family moved here in 1954 and became the first family of color in the neighborhood. Fifty years later, the county foreclosed on West’s home due to delinquent property taxes. The last surviving member of her family, she now has two days to vacate the house.

“Ah, here it is,” she says, lowering her glasses to read. In the passage, the Prophet Micah is berating the rich and powerful for their attacks on the poor of the kingdom of Judah. “You drive the women of our people from their pleasant homes. You take away my blessing from their children forever.'”