"Much More Than Tulsa": The Erasing Of Black Wealth

 

Pulitzer Prize winning columnist Eugene Robinson's WaPo column today on the 100th anniversary of the final day of the massacre of hundreds of African-Americans in Tulsa, OK at the hands of a white racist mob reminds us that we can't forget that Tulsa wasn't singular:

"No one should be under the impression that the burning of “Black Wall Street” in Tulsa a century ago was a one-off atrocity. In fact, it was part of a long and shameful pattern in which White mobs used murderous violence to erase African American prosperity.

It happened in Atlanta in September 1906. Fabricated “reports” of sexual assaults by Black men against White women were used to inflame White vigilantes to attack African Americans. [snip]

It happened in East St. Louis, Ill., in the summer of 1917. White workers at steel, aluminum and meatpacking plants resented the fact that African Americans — part of the Great Migration moving north out of the Deep South — were filling jobs. [snip]

Perhaps the worst of the 1919 riots was in Chicago. By now, you can guess the context: the Great Migration, African American workers competing for jobs, growing Black prosperity. The spark came on July 27, when a Black teenager crossed the unofficial color line demarcating where Whites and African Americans were allowed to swim at the 29th Street beach on Lake Michigan. That youth, named Eugene Williams, was pelted with rocks by a White beachgoer and drowned."

Shakespeare's phrase that "what's past is prologue" couldn't be more true in this sequence of violent attacks on striving African-American communities: competition for jobs, increasing African-American prosperity and their growing population. False allegations of sexual assault have often provided the trigger for white mobs. 

As Robinson notes, the effect of these race massacres was to destroy African-American wealth just as it was ascending in the early part of the 20th century:

"The destruction of African American businesses amounted to theft on a massive scale — a theft whose impact was felt for generations. The Greenwood neighborhood of Tulsa could have become an enclave of Black millionaires. But Whites were not about to let that happen."

President Biden travels to Tulsa today to mark the shameful anniversary, and is expected to announce measures to narrow the economic gap between African-Americans and whites, including stimulating home ownership as a means to build wealth. As civil rights groups have pointed out, erasing student loan debt overall would provide an immediate uplift to millions of African-Americans. Hopefully, those proposals will make a difference, to the extent they're not blocked by Trumpist Republicans.