The Great Atrocity Quietly Disappeared
“You have to make your peace with the chaos. but you can not lie. You can not forget how much they took from us and how they transfigured our very bodies into sugar, tobacco, cotton, and gold” -Ta-Nehisi Coates
Racism is a blunt, crude, and visceral experience. Any light study of American History will show this. The text book images of welted backs and lynched corpses need no caption. We know slavery was physical.
If we dig a little deeper, the emotional wounds surface — the trauma a mother experiences watching her children cry as Klansmen raid her home is evident. We know Jim Crow was psychological.
And when we conduct a more nuanced study, the pervasiveness of powerlessness emerges. The despair a teacher feels for his overcrowded and underfunded class is crushing. We know segregation was political.
We know all this. These forms of socio-political oppression are intertwined and their ramifications have been centerfield in our country’s dialogue at least since the Civil Rights Movement. But there is another form of oppression we don’t talk about. It’s not in the history books nor on our national debate agenda, yet it’s the topic most fundamental to understanding our nation’s Original Sin. If we are ever to come to terms with the consequences of racism, then we must acknowledge the economics of racism.
“By 1860, there were more millionaires (slaveholders all) living in the lower Mississippi Valley than anywhere else in the United States” writes James McPherson in his book on the Civil War Battle Cry of Freedom. The book spells out the financial roots of racism reading, “In the same year, the nearly 4 million American slaves were worth some $3.5 billion, making them the largest single financial asset in the entire U.S. economy, worth more than all manufacturing and railroads combined.”
Plain and clear, slaves were America’s most valuable “natural” resource. And for those who owned them, they were a treasure worth fighting for. So in the fall of 1860, when America elected Abraham Lincoln, someone who planned to limit the scope of slavery, it was only natural that slave owners would act to protect their property.
Jefferson Davis asserted that the South had no choice, stating that Lincoln’s plans would make “property in slaves so insecure as to be comparatively worthless … thereby annihilating in effect property worth thousands of millions of dollars.” Slaves owners would not stand idly by, as they lost the rights to expand their great riches.
The American Civil War ensued. Ultimately 11 states succeeded, with the war lasting four for years, and claiming over 600,000 lives. But with a Union victory, 1863’s Emancipation Proclamation, and the Constitutional Amendments in the years to follow, Blacks would finally begin their long walk towards political equality. However, economic equality remained stubbornly elusive.
The 1870 census, the nation’s first survey of wealth and race, shows that the “there were 2.5 cents of wealth per black household for every dollar of wealth held by white households.” There would be no constitutional amendment to address this inequity — no retribution for the former slave’s toil.
After Lincoln’s death in 1865 and the end of Reconstruction in 1877; Black’s brief moment in the sun was over. New forms of economic oppression and exploitation emerged.
Jim Crow and sharecropping sprouted in the south. In many ways, they were new forms of slavery pairing robbery of the ballot box with robbery of the bank account. Ta-Nehisi Coates describes this new southern economy in The Case for Reparations.
“Black farmers lived in debt peonage, under the sway of cotton kings who were at once their landlords, their employers, and their primary merchants. Tools and necessities were advanced against the return on the crop, which was determined by the employer. When farmers were deemed to be in debt — and they often were — the negative balance was then carried over to the next season. A man or woman who protested this arrangement did so at the risk of grave injury or death.”
In the north, redlining, predatory loans, and employment discrimination trapped blacks in poverty. With a surplus Blacks from the great Migration and a deficit of blue collar jobs and FHA backed loans, the populations of the northern Black ghetto skyrocketed.
It was under this enormous pressure of racial oppression, that the Civil Rights Movement was born. Again from 1955-1968, America rallied for the end of political oppression of Blacks. Brown vs. Board, The Civil Rights Act of 1963, the Voters Right Act of 1965, and slew legislative reforms worked to restore full citizenship and integrate the American public. But the country never fully embraced the Movement’s call for economic opportunity.
In 1967, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote on this as he reflected on the decline of the Civil Rights Movement. “When Negroes looked for the second phase, the realization of equality, they found that many of their white allies had quietly disappeared.”
With the assassination of King and without meaningful economic policy interventions, the racial wealth gap persisted. As the American economy automated and globalized in the latter half of the twentieth century, it further isolated impoverished Blacks. The Truly Disadvantaged arose — an entire population of Blacks ensnared in concentrated, isolated, intergenerational poverty.
From the Southside of Chicago to West Baltimore, these communities persist across the nation today. And while they certainly face social and political obstacles, it is the unaddressed economic exploitation that primarily plagues them. If we ever hope to cure this blight that racism created, we must first acknowledge the yet to be addressed economic underdevelopment of Black America. Only then can we comprehend the magnitude of the economic solutions required to fix the problem our country created.
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This blog is the first in a series of three that will explore how the private sector can address the racial wealth gap in the U.S. You can read Part Two here.
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