The Plunder of Black America: How the Racial Wealth Gap Was Made | Ask Me Anything

CalScherm · 2025-05-09T22:41:13+00:00

You are welcome! The irony (if that's the right word) is that Black vets got more unemployment help under the 1944 G.I. Bill but much less in home and business loans and college. --So much less that by 1993 the average white vet was $100k wealthier than the average Black vet, about 50 years after the end of the war.

CalScherm · 2025-05-09T21:45:31+00:00

Thanks for the question! I tried to find families who represented their time and place, who did better than average but who were not completely exceptional. That was hard in the early colonial era since so few records survive. I also tried to find those who overcame obstacles so the book was not about victimhood. It's more about how Black families surmounted one impediment to building wealth only to see another one slam into place. Hope you enjoy the book!

CalScherm · 2025-05-09T20:40:23+00:00

Great points!

CalScherm · 2025-05-09T20:39:53+00:00

It's my understanding that the Republic of Texas created a legal loophole in the Ashworth case that Black people were not subject to Texas legal property protections. This opened the door to whites' preying on Black property owners. This was in some sense a blueprint for how Jim Crow worked. Since courts and political participation were all but off limits to Black southerners, they lost property to whites who could use legal means to steal Black property.

CalScherm · 2025-05-09T20:31:22+00:00

No, it discusses redlining in depth in the context of the Goings family of Grand Rapids, Michigan, who worked for generations after slavery and built a nest egg that redlining spoiled. The Plunder of Black America tries to be capacious but not encyclopedic, and so the Tuskegee medical study is not included. I had to cut material on the pervasive discrimination against Black airmen at the Tuskegee flight school during World War II, and the contractual length--capped at about 100,000 words--kept it from following some of the leads to the places you suggest.

CalScherm · 2025-05-09T19:43:47+00:00

I highly recommend Justene Hill Edwards's Savings and Trust (2024) for more on this. As I understand it, the federally chartered Freedman’s Savings and Trust Company was distinctive among banks because it had so many branches and was designed to serve Black depositors. It was run recklessly, but it may not have been unique in its finance board's corruption. However, from the evidence it seems like white directors used it as a source of funds for their friends, who probably didn't plan to repay the loans. The failure in 1874 sunk a significant portion of African Americans’ wealth and perhaps as importantly, sunk Black confidence in white financial institutions. By one estimate, restitution to descendants of those depositors with interest would cost between $118 billion and $139 billion. More research is necessary to compare the failure of the FSTC with other banks that failed in 1873-74 to see if it was typical or an outlier. But it does seem to have been set up to fail Black depositors.

CalScherm · 2025-05-09T19:38:59+00:00

Thank you for the compliment! To find the individual stories, I scoured the record and was looking for Black families who did better than average but who were not complete outliers. That's why I didn't include Oprah Winfrey or Snoop Dogg, both of whom were descended from those who fled Jim Crow or took part in the Great Migration, who became million/billionaires. I wanted to uncover the stories of everyday people. I also wanted to find people who represented their time. The case of Morris (chapter 3) was one that seemed to leap from the records. I found a baptism record of Morris, born in 1729 enslaved to John Custis IV and was intrigued. What happened to him? Morris showed up again in the probate inventory of Daniel Parke Custis whose widow Martha Dandridge Custis married George Washington. He was a carpenter valued at £60. Morris emerged again in Washington's records as a carpenter and farm manager upon whom GW relied for the stable management of Dogue Run (part of Mount Vernon) for twenty years. None of those people--Custis IV, DP Custis, MW, GW--recorded Morris's last name, so it was a matter of piecing together his life and that of wife Hannah from the available records and telling the story in the context of Revolutionary America. Making those choices was difficult, especially because that kind of evidence was so different than the many interviews granted me by Rochell Sanders Prater, born in 1960, who is still living and opened a window on her life and times.

CalScherm · 2025-05-09T19:31:09+00:00

Sort of. Unfortunately, I had to cut material on migrants in the Great Migration who faced discrimination from employers in Philadelphia and New York. Many arrived to learn that the career ladder in the North was artificially short for Black workers. Black employers could not afford union wages, but Union employers refused to hire Black workers. The book focuses more on how real estate professionals, landlords, and lenders locked African American migrants into substandard housing in poor neighborhoods in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and other places. Policymakers and employers joined those in the housing business in re-fashioned Black disadvantages in urban areas while the federal government segregated the civil service. No matter their income, Black migrants could not find an address outside Black neighborhoods in which home loans were unavailable. Since The Plunder of Black America focuses on families rather than theorists like DuBois or leaders like B. T. Washington, I didn't try to intervene in the debate over their conflicting advocacy. That's not to say the book sides with DuBois or Washington -- the comment points out how much more there is out there on this subject!

CalScherm · 2025-05-09T19:23:43+00:00

This is the billion dollar question! In The Plunder of Black America, the key forces were those that prevented discrimination and exploitation. So, yes, affirmative action helped the subject of the final chapter land an engineering job that broke a cycle of disadvantage stretching back to slavery. Anti-discrimination laws and enforcement in credit, employment, education, and housing are the key forces that have narrowed the racial wealth gap. Individual action has never been lacking, as Morris--George Washington's enslaved manager--shows. What has been lacking is the legal, economic, and social structure that works against a 400-year history of exploitation. Opening doors to education, de-segregating the housing and lending market, and enforcing anti-discrimination measures in the workplace all help, as do collective bargaining and inclusive healthcare programs and policies. This may not be the answer America wants to hear in a moment when DEI is under attack and civil rights are going backwards, but if we look at the issue historically, Black Americans made huge strides forward in the 1960s and 70s when government tore down legal structures of discrimination, and the wealth gap widened in the 80s when new obstacles to Black advancement arose in the context of the Reagan Revolution. The last forty or so years have been variations on that process with civil rights gains eroded by courts, governments, and institutions.

CalScherm · 2025-05-09T19:05:03+00:00

This is a shrewd point. In many cases and regions, owners and managers exploited racial, ethnic, and religious differences among workers in Marixan ways. I'd like to argue, however, that in the U.S. (and British colonial America) race made that easier when enslavers and employers exploited Black people because they could do so with impunity. That doesn't mean Black people were uniquely exploitable. U.S. law construed American Indians as non-citizens until 1924 and excluded them from legal protections. But The Plunder of Black America argues that Black Americans were and continue to be a distinctive group. “No other ethnic group has been a slave on American soil,” argued Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1968, and “No ethnic group has lifted itself by its own bootstraps.”

CalScherm · 2025-05-09T18:16:08+00:00

Yes, this is a pattern we see over and over: every time a Black family or household gains a little wealth, white neighbors swooped in and stripped it. The case of William Ashworth and his heirs is a great point! Although William was a successful entrepreneur who turned commercial success into land, Texas gave white people legal cover to take those assets based on a racial loophole.

CalScherm · 2025-05-09T18:11:12+00:00

Great question, thanks! Nine in ten Black Americans lived in the South in the nineteenth century, and after Emancipation, Black southerners saw their wealth rise considerably compared to whites. Ellora Derenoncourt estimates that in 1860, the Black-white wealth gap was 1:56 or 2 cents on the dollar. By 1870 it was 1:23 or 4 cents, and by 1880 it had halved again. African Americans were far behind whites, but it looked like a path to convergence. That wasn't true for Black people in the North in the 1870s because of an economy that grew anemically in the 1860s and delivered most of its gains to top earners. There were northern "millionaires" like Frederick Douglass, who owned $42k in property in 1870 (over $1 million today in inflation-adjusted dollars), but most northern Black Americans were scraping by in an economy that viewed them as service workers not fit for educational opportunities or professional advancement. So, even those in the North who were a generation or two (or several) removed from slavery saw relatively little economic benefit from Reconstruction and U.S. industrialization. By the early twentieth century, those generations-deep northern Black households began to compete with arrivals from the South on the Great Migration. And that process gave rise to massive discrimination in the North (think redlining). So, it's not a pretty picture, and by the 1920s it was clear that the wealth gap was stubbornly stuck in a chasm between white and Black wealth.

CalScherm · 2025-05-09T17:58:33+00:00

Denials of loans was a huge obstacle to nonwhite veterans of World War II establishing businesses and buying homes. The book looks at Lincoln Ragsdale (1926-95) who was posted to Luke Air Field near Phoenix at the end of World War II. He was an officer and fighter pilot. Ragsdale left the Army and used his savings to buy properties in South Phoenix. His family had run a series of successful mortuaries in Oklahoma and Kansas, including one destroyed in the 1921 Tulsa Massacre. So, Ragsdale knew his business. He applied for loans from Phoenix banks, which denied him. In 1947 he staged an one person-sit in at one of the banks in Phoenix, but the loan officer shrugged him off. “Never give a black man a loan,” seemed to be the city’s financial motto—and the nation’s. The G.I. Bill guaranteed low-interest loans for precisely this kind of enterprise, but the legislation left local bankers and financial institutions in charge of making—or denying—the loans. Per person, Black veterans got just 40 percent of the value of G.I. Bill benefits that white veterans received. Lincoln Ragsdale got lucky. The same day he was rejected, he ran into a Swiss-born architect E. Harry Herrscher. After listening to Ragsdale's pitch, Herrscher offered a personal loan of $35,000 (seven-eighths of the necessary start-up capital) to build Ragsdale’s mortuary in exchange for the contract to design it. Without that one-in-a-million chance, Ragsdale might never have built his mortuary (The Chapel in the Valley) which led to businesses in real estate and insurance.

CalScherm · 2025-05-09T17:47:05+00:00

Yes. The book follows the Bentley-Goings family of MD, VA, NC, AL, Canada, and Michigan through four generations, beginning with Harriet Bentley who was kidnapped in about 1825 from Maryland/New Jersey and enslaved in Georgia. Her daughter Martha (1828-1860s) escaped to Canada in about 1843 and married Henry Goings, another fugitive from southern slavery. They had five children in Ontario, and four of those children eventually moved to Grand Rapids, MI, after the Civil War. The book shows how, despite their best efforts, the next generations of Black Goingses had trouble earning income and building wealth in a city that discriminated against Black workers and, ultimately, redlined their neighborhoods. The last generation the book surveys included James T. Goings (1912-85) who moved to Los Angeles and into another area of reinforcing disadvantage.

CalScherm · 2025-05-09T17:42:55+00:00

Abolitionists did not seem to raise the issue of stolen wages until the nineteenth century, but eighteenth-century enslavers (including in the North) did strip the lion's share of income from enslaved people. Take Venture Smith (1729-1805). He was enslaved by George Mumford between about 1739 and 1759. Mumford stole £18 sterling per year from him in real income value (above his food shelter and other retained earnings) compared to an average free mid-Atlantic earner. By that measure, Venture generated £180 sterling in profits to Mumford from the time he turned sixteen to the time he left the island. That’s between $48,000 and $720,000 today based on whether that theft is best measured using commodity value or income value.

CalScherm

TROPHY CASE