[Martin Luther King Jr.] The fact is
that millions of Negroes,
as a result of centuries of denial and neglect,
have been left bootless.
It is a cruel jest to say to a bootless man
that he ought to lift himself by his own bootstraps.
At the dawn of emancipation,
the total Black wealth in America was about 0.5%.
Today that number is between 1-2%.
So there has been practically no movement.
The most pernicious form
of the racial wealth gap is when we take people,
human beings, as capital for others,
as being an asset by which others can be enriched,
can accumulate, can pass down resources
from one generation to the other.
[Martin Luther King Jr.] They find themselves
impoverished aliens in this affluent society
and there is a great deal that society can and must do
if the Negro is to gain the economic security that he needs.
The origins of the racial wealth gap begins
when Black people entered the shores of the United States
as chattel capital.
There were two forms
in which Black people served as capital,
the uncompensated labor that they provided,
but their sheer bodies themselves could be traded,
could be traded and stood as a source of wealth
and wealth building for White people.
The enslavement of Black people in America
is what made the U.S. economy grow
into the powerhouse that it is today.
Even though most of this farming activity was going on
in the southern part of the United States,
businesses all over the country were involved in this.
Insurance companies insured the slaves themselves.
There were even slave-backed securities
that could be traded by financial institutions.
In essence, slavery encompassed nearly every part
of the U.S. economy at this point.
At the start of the Civil War,
each slave was worth an average of $1,000.
That came to $4 billion at that point
because there were around four million slaves in the U.S.
In today's money, that comes to $42 trillion
and $42 trillion is about double the size
of the current U.S. economy.
With the 13th Amendment that freed slaves,
the point is that, that's not enough.
When you've had centuries of literally bondage imposed
upon a people, if you want true justice or true freedom,
there needed to be not only that freedom from bondage,
but actual accompanying of resources
so that people could pursue their livelihood.
Expecting a people to to thrive and flourish
without compensation for all that unjust harm
really just set up a system for oppression
and a system that was unjust.
Toward the end of the Civil War,
General William Tecumseh Sherman made a promise to slaves
that as soon as the war was over,
they would be granted 40 acres of land and a mule.
This idea of giving land had a dual purpose.
People that supported it saw it as a way
to both free the formerly-enslaved from their old masters
and as a way to dilute the power
of these southern land owners.
But a few months later,
President Abraham Lincoln was shot and killed.
His Vice President, Johnson,
swiftly got rid of this promise.
When Andrew Johnson vetoed the Freedmen's Bill,
he said, look, this is a White man's government,
so that was the impetus.
But also used this idea
that the government doesn't give away land,
this is capitalism.
And the idea that this is a free market and laissez faire
was very much used to undercut claims of the 40 acres,
while at the same time
the government is giving away free land out west
through the Homestead Act.
The Homestead Acts were a series of bills
meant to encourage settlement of the American West.
In all, 270 million acres were given out
as part of the bills.
That land, which accounts for about 10%
of the entire country,
was mostly stolen from Native Americans
and most of the 1.5 million Americans
that benefited from the Homestead Acts were White.
They were literally giveaways
that provided White people ultimately a key ingredient
to build wealth, and that's capital itself,
and by design Black people were not included.
The Homestead Act is a dramatic indicator
of U.S. government facilitating the accumulation
for White people and not facilitating it for Black people,
but it's one of many.
The Homestead Act fits into a larger context
that throughout our United States history,
well beyond slavery, we think about racial repression
and we think that with emancipation,
that all of a sudden we were a free country,
but a bigger point to make is that
if we think about a middle class,
a middle, White, asset-building class,
it was government policy that generated it.
What little economic successes
Black people were able to have at this time
often spurred a lot of resentment among Whites.
This led to thousands of lynchings of Black people
and other violent attacks,
sometimes on entire Black neighborhoods and communities.
My name is Roy Woodle
and I'm not ashamed to be a Klansmen.
Amen!
This was in the time of heavy Jim Crow,
it was in the time of rising Klan,
and in the time where White supremacy was gaining
this pseudo-scientific legitimacy.
It is the case that throughout history,
not only have Blacks not been permitted
to accumulate land, capital and other forms of resource
to the same extent as Whites,
but when they were able to overcome barriers
and accumulate those resources, it's always been subject
to outright terror, outright seizure,
because we did not have the codification
that comes along with government
to protect the resources of Black people
in the same way that it was protected for White people.
Tulsa, for example, in the 1900s, there was oil boom
with a lot of wealth that was in that community
and so they built the Greenwood District
and the central part of the city was this Black church.
It was very ornate and beautiful.
These places are called the Black Wall Street,
where it wasn't a sharecropping market,
there were landholdings.
The thing that happened was that the racial resentment grew.
There were bombings
and really just a complete destruction of that city
and very much stemming from that resentment.
In that one day,
Black Wall Street was destroyed
and 10,000 Tulsans were displaced.
There's even evidence that World War One bomber planes
were used to burn the town.
In Tulsa alone,
the property damage amounts to about $200 million
in today's money.
The Tulsa Massacre was not an isolated incident.
About 100 of these occurred
between the end of the Civil War and the 1940s,
destroying a substantial amount of Black wealth.
On the one hand,
those communities are clear examples
of the ways in which Black people have demonstrated
they can not only survive, but they can actually thrive.
But on the other hand, we romanticize the past.
We describe a nostalgia as if we had these kingdoms of gold,
when in reality, it was never the case
that Black people had wealth en masse.
That said, left to our own druthers,
the wealth gap is not gonna be solved.
Slavery itself created a multi-trillion dollar wealth gap
and the period immediately following slavery
didn't do anything to close it.
And none of that includes the one thing
that most people today
can trace their wealth back to: Home ownership.
Following the Great Depression,
Congress passed a series of laws to help the country recover
from the economic crisis.
Among them was the 1934 National Housing Act.
This law, for the first time, made home ownership affordable
to working class individuals.
And that was a good thing, except for the fact
that it intentionally excluded Black people.
Then mortgage companies did not lend to Black people.
In fact, the federal government went the other way.
The federal government, as well as local government,
they facilitated the process
of excluding Black people from these products
and how did they do so?
Neighborhoods were redlined.
The government created maps that showed the level
of risk by neighborhood.
These had different colors
and the riskiest was outlined in red.
This was very much a crude calculus
but sophisticated in a way
that they actually had tons of maps across the country
and you would see the way
that they mapped out a neighborhood
and they looked at the house: Is it single-family?
Is it industrial?
Is it farmland?
What are the characteristics of the neighborhood?
But the number one thing that they looked at
is who lives there?
So they would say this is a Black neighborhood, redline.
And naturally what would develop?
Slums.
What would develop? Neighborhood degregation.
When you have capital fleeing certain areas
and capital being flooded into areas,
the outcomes become obvious.
If you lived in a Black neighborhood,
because it was a Black neighborhood,
you did not get that FHA mortgage,
you did not get that GI bill loan,
you did not get the farm loans.
So today the legacy of those laws
is that your neighborhood is very much racially-coded.
This is how racism gets embedded in wealth.
Word came from Capitol Hill
that Congress had passed and sent to the White House
the Civil Rights Act of 1968.
Included in the measure was a landmark open housing bill,
which, when fully effective, would forbid discrimination
in approximately 80% of all housing offered
for rent or for sale in the United States.
The Civil Rights Movement,
and in particular the Fair Housing Act of 1968,
tried to put an end to that discrimination.
Fair housing for all,
all human beings who live in this country,
is now a part of the American way of life.
But they didn't have much economic power
and they struggled to undo the decades of damage
that had already been done.
Since that time the wealth gap has actually widened.
In 1967, Black families had 1/5 the wealth
of White families.
Today, that number is 1/7.
And that really is the legacy of the racial wealth gap.
It's not just that you have more money in the bank account,
your house is higher value.
It is also the opportunities;
the ladders up for your kids are different
in certain neighborhoods,
non-existent in some neighborhoods
and, quite frankly, hard to fall off of
in other neighborhoods.
This story is not all dismal.
Just like policy can be enacted
to create these unjust disparities,
likewise policy can be enacted to rectify them.
What we need today is a new policy regime
that provides that resource in a way that's anti-racist
so that we all can have the opportunity
for capital accumulation and intergenerational transfers.
We need something in perpetuity that ensures
that as a birthright
no American is excluded from the economic security
that comes along with a capital endowment.