Page 89 - 1619 Project Curriculum

August 18, 2019

Elmore Bolling, whose brothers wealth for white people is $171,000, the formerly enslaved with the land middle class through sweeping

A.

called him Buddy, was a kind of compared with just $17,600 for black grants of 40 acres,’’ says William social programs, including Social

t is worse on the margins.
one-man economy in Lowndesboro, people. I Darity Jr., a professor of public pol- Security and the minimum wage. But

Ala. He leased a plantation, where he According to the Economic Policy icy and African-American studies a majority of black people at the time

had a general store with a gas station Institute, 19 percent of black house- at Duke University. Any financial were agricultural laborers or domes-

out front and a catering business; he holds have zero or negative net progress that black people made tic workers, occupations that were

grew cotton, corn and sugar cane. worth. Just 9 percent of white fami- was regarded as an affront to white ineligible for these benefits. The
He also owned a small fleet of trucks lies are that poor. supremacy. After a decade of black establishment of the Home Owners

that ran livestock and made deliv- Today’s racial wealth gap is per- gains under Reconstruction, a much Loan Corporation in 1933 helped

eries between Lowndesboro and haps the most glaring legacy of longer period of racial violence save the collapsing housing market,

Montgomery. At his peak, Bolling American slavery and the violent would wipe nearly all of it away. but it largely excluded black neigh-

employed as many as 40 people, all economic dispossession that fol- To assuage Southern white people, borhoods from government-insured

of them black like him. lowed. The fate suffered by Elmore the federal government pulled out loans. Those neighborhoods were

One December day in 1947, a Bolling and his family was not unique the Union troops who were stationed deemed ‘‘hazardous’’ and colored

group of white men showed up along to them, or to Jim Crow Alabama. It in the South to keep order. During in with red on maps, a practice that

a stretch of Highway 80 just yards was part of a much broader social this period of so-called Redemp- came to be known as ‘‘redlining.’’
from Bolling’s home and store, where and political campaign. When legal tion, lawmakers throughout the The G.I. Bill is often hailed as one

he lived with his wife, Bertha Mae, slavery ended in 1865, there was great South enacted Black Codes and Jim of Roosevelt’s most enduring lega-

and their seven young children. The hope for formerly enslaved people. Crow laws that stripped black peo- cies. It helped usher millions of work-

men confronted him on a section of Between 1865 and 1870, the Recon- ple of many of their freedoms and ing-class veterans through college

road he had helped lay and shot him struction Amendments established property. Other white people, often and into new homes and the middle

seven times — six times with a pis- birthright citizenship — making all aided by law enforcement, waged a class. But it discriminatorily benefit-

tol and once with a shotgun blast to black people citizens and granting campaign of violence against black ed white people. While the bill didn’t

the back. His family rushed from the them equal protection under the law people that would rob them of an explicitly exclude black veterans, the

store to find him lying dead in a ditch. — and gave black men the right to incalculable amount of wealth. way it was administered often did.

The shooters didn’t even cover vote. There was also the promise of Armed white people stormed The bill gave veterans access to mort-
their faces; they didn’t need to. compensation. In January 1865, Gen. prosperous majority-black Wilming- gages with no down payments, but

Everyone knew who had done it and William Sherman issued an order ton, N.C., in 1898 to murder dozens the Veterans Administration adopted
why. ‘‘He was too successful to be a reallocating hundreds of thousands of black people, force 2,000 others the same racially restrictive policies

Negro,’’ someone who knew Bolling of acres of white-owned land along off their property and overthrow the as the Federal Housing Administra-

told a newspaper at the time. When the coasts of Florida, Georgia and city government. In the Red Summer tion, which guaranteed bank loans

Bolling was killed, his family esti- South Carolina for settlement by of 1919, at least 240 black people only to developers who wouldn’t sell

mates he had as much as $40,000 in black families in 40-acre plots. Con- were murdered across the country. to black people. ‘‘The major way in

the bank and more than $5,000 in gress established the Freedmen’s And in 1921, in one of the bloodiest which people have an opportunity to

assets, about $500,000 in today’s dol- Bureau to oversee the transition from racial attacks in United States histo- accumulate wealth is contingent on

lars. But within months of his murder slavery to freedom, and the Freed- ry, Greenwood, a prosperous black the wealth positions of their parents

nearly all of it man’s Savings Bank was formed to neighborhood in Tulsa, Okla., was and their grandparents,’’ Darity says.

would be gone. White

creditors and people posing as cred- help four million formerly enslaved burned and looted. It is estimated ‘‘To the extent that blacks have the

itors took the money the family got people gain financial freedom. that as many as 300 black people capacity to accumulate wealth, we

from the sale of their trucks and cat- When Lincoln was assassinated, were murdered and 10,000 were ren- have not had the ability to transfer

tle. They even staked claims on what Vice President Andrew Johnson dered homeless. Thirty-five square the same kinds of resources across

was left of the family’s savings. The effectively rescinded Sherman’s blocks were destroyed. No one was generations.’’

jobs that he provided were gone, too. order by pardoning white planta- ever convicted in any of these acts of

Almost overnight the Bollings went tion owners and returning to them racist violence. Seventy years later, the effects of

from prosperity to poverty. Bertha the land on which 40,000 or so black ‘‘You have limited opportunity Bolling’s murder are still felt by his

Mae found work at a dry cleaner. The families had settled. ‘‘This is a coun- to accumulate wealth, and then you children and their children. ‘‘There
older children dropped out of school try for white men, and by God, as have a process where that wealth is was no inheritance, nothing for

to help support the family. Within long as I am President, it shall be a destroyed or taken away,’’ Darity says. my father to pass down, because it

two years, the Bollings fled Lowndes government for white men,’’ Johnson ‘‘And all of that is prior to the eff ects was all taken away,’’ says Josephine

County, fearing for their lives. declared in 1866. The Freedmen’s of restrictive covenants — redlining, Bolling McCall, the only one of

Bureau, always meant to be tempo- the discriminatory application of the Bolling’s children to get a college

The period that followed the Civil rary, was dismantled in 1872. More G.I. Bill and other federal programs.’’ degree. Of the seven siblings, those

War was one of economic terror and than 60,000 black people deposited The post-Reconstruction plun- with more education fared best;

wealth-stripping that has left black more than $1 million into the Freed- dering of black wealth was not just the men struggled most, primarily

people at lasting economic disadvan- man’s Savings Bank, but its all-white a product of spontaneous violence, working as low-paid laborers. Of

tage. White Americans have seven trustees began issuing speculative but etched in law and public policy. Elmore and Bertha Mae’s 25 grand-

times the wealth of black Americans loans to white investors and corpo- Through the first half of the 20th cen- children, only six graduated from

on average. Though black people rations, and when it failed in 1874, tury, the federal government actively college; of those, two are McCall’s

make up nearly 13 percent of the many black depositors lost much of excluded black people from govern- children. The rest are unemployed

United States population, they hold their savings. ment wealth-building programs. In or underemployed. They have never

less than 3 percent of the nation’s ‘‘The origins of the racial wealth the 1930s, President Franklin Roose- known anything like the prosperity

total wealth. The median family gap start with the failure to provide velt’s New Deal helped build a solid of their grandparents.•

Zora J 83

Photograph by Murff