One morning, I scanned through hundreds of black-and-white photographs of well-dressed socialites from the 1920s and 1930s. Some of the images displayed the famed contralto Etta Moten Barnett and her husband Claude, founder of the Associated Negro Press. Others displayed physicians, statesmen, and artists. These were the faces of Bronzeville, the thriving Black commercial district on Chicago’s South Side that was once home to the tastemakers that brought meaning and power to life in a culture of racial segregation.
“Every city, almost, where we were had their version of Black Wall Street,” said entrepreneur Hill Harper during an interview back in May. “Detroit had Paradise Valley and Black Bottom. There was Rosewood. There’s incredibly well-hilled cities in Virginia that had very prosperous Black communities that were destroyed.” At the time of our conversation, Harper was touring the country to commemorate 100 years since the Black Wall Street massacre in Greenwood. The significance of this historical event had not received due exposure until fairly recently, with mainstream coverage in the United States and abroad.
“The first time American citizens were ever bombed by the air was not Pearl Harbor and was not 9/11,” Harper explained. “It was the Greenwood district in Tulsa, Oklahoma. No insurance claim has ever been paid out. No reparations have ever been paid. So we have some major announcements to make because we want to support the survivors and descendant families and we want to help the community and we want to build not just Greenwood, but also build nationally.”
Earlier this year, Harper announced the creation of the first Black-owned digital wallet. The platform, called, The Black Wall Street, is intended to encourage more people to learn about and start using cryptocurrency. This sphere, he said, could not be burned down. The platform is cofounded by Najah Roberts, who runs the first Black-owned brick-and-mortar space where people can buy cryptocurrency. That space is in Oakland, California. Harper, Roberts, and other entrepreneurs, social activists, and economists across the United States are focusing efforts on pathways toward generating wealth for Black Americans after decades of systematic disenfranchisement. Ideas vary—from Dr. William Sandy Darity’s reparations plan to the ADOS movement to the proposal of a “Blexit” by the controversial conservative figure Candace McOwen. Proposals aside, Harper said the original Black Wall Street in Tulsa was centered upon three pillars that could serve as a guide on the path to understanding how to rebuild and maintain wealth in Black American communities: “The first pillar was institutional ownership,” he said. “The second pillar was institutional trust and the third was the movement of money or capital within the ecosystem. Back then, that was up to a year or more within the ecosystem. Today, a dollar leaves the Black community within six to seven hours.”
There have been efforts within the past five years to strengthen the power of the Black dollar due, in great part, to increased social activism. Yet, the very definition of the Black community is evolving as demographics and migration patterns shift.
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