than to white applicants and devised ways to avoid dealing with African-Americans. In a consent decree, the bank agreed to pay $1 million to compensate 48 victims of discrimination and to take a series of corrective measures to ensure compliance with federal fair lending laws. Banking regulators increased pressure on lenders to comply with the guidelines of the Community Reinvestment Act, which encourages deposit-holding financial institutions to make loans throughout their service areas. For the first time, regulators in 1989 denied an application for a bank merger on the grounds of poor performance under the Community Reinvestment Act. Along with responses from lawmakers and regulators, Atlanta's largest banks agreed to lend $65 million at low rates to moderate-income borrowers, particularly on the city's black Southside. Life and career Born in Chattanooga, Tennessee, Dedman grew up in neighboring Red Bank, Tennessee. He started in journalism at age 16 as a copy boy at the Chattanooga Times. He attended Washington University in St. Louis, writing for the student newspaper Student Life and editing part-time for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, but dropped out of college to work as the reporter at The Daily Star-Journal in Warrensburg, Missouri. Dedman was a reporter for the Knoxville News Sentinel, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Washington Post, and The Boston Globe. He was the first director of computer-assisted reporting for The Associated Press. He has covered news and sports part-time for The New York Times, including the home run record chase between Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa in 1998 and 1999. From 2006 to 2014, Dedman was an investigative reporter for NBC News and NBCNews.com, formerly known as msnbc.com, uncovering stories including firefighter deaths from faulty equipment, fraud in Pentagon efforts to identify war dead, widespread failures to inspect highway bridges, efforts by U.S. officials to hide the risk of earthquake damage to nuclear power plants, hidden visitor logs at the Obama White House, suppression of Hillary Rodham Clinton's college thesis at the request of the Clinton White House, and journalists making campaign contributions. In 2014 he joined Newsday, the daily newspaper on Long Island, N.Y., as a senior writer, reporting investigative stories in print, online, and on television for Newsday and its sister cable television channel, News 12 Long Island. He was one of the four lead reporters on Newsday's 2019 undercover investigation of racial steering by real estate agents, Long Island Divided. The investigation revealed that