Four Numbers That Show the Cost of Slavery on Black Wealth Today - Tulsa is famous!

[Bloomberg]

At the end of the Civil War, Union General William Tecumseh Sherman promised some 4 million freed slaves land that they would own, live, and work on to build an economic future for themselves — also known as 40 acres and a mule. “Genuine freedom required some kind of economic base,” says Eric Foner, a professor emeritus of history at Columbia University, on episode 2 of The Pay Check podcast. “And in an agricultural society that meant owning land.”

Instead, after President Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, his successor, Andrew Johnson, reneged on the deal. Black Americans started their freed lives empty handed. By some estimates that land would have been worth as much as $3.1 trillion today….

The racial wealth gap begins with slavery itself, which was a huge wealth generator for White Americans. The economic value of the 4 million slaves in 1860 was, on average, $1,000 per person, or about $4 billion total. That was more than all the banks, railroads and factories in the U.S. were worth at the time. In today’s dollars, that would come out to as much as $42 trillion, accounting for inflation and compounding interest….

Slavery was also the engine driving the cotton economy, which enriched everyone from banks, shopkeepers, and insurers, too. Meanwhile, slaves lost out on an estimated $20.3 trillion in wages for their labor….

What little wealth Black families were able to build after the Civil War was often destroyed violently. In the most egregious incident, the Tulsa massacre of 1921, mobs and police officers burned down what was then known as Black Wall Street, obliterating $200 million in homes and businesses and displacing 10,000 Black Tulsans…. After the Civil War and well into the 20th Century, there were about 100 of these attacks, in addition to some 3,000 lynchings of Black Americans.