Thread by @TracyJan

This is what white supremacy leads to: the destruction of Black lives and Black wealth, the impact of which reverberates a century after the #TulsaMassacre

Let us never forget. washingtonpost.com/business/2021/…

This is Brenda Nails-Alford. Her grandparents owned Nails Brothers, a shoe and record store in Tulsa’s historically Black Greenwood district in the early 1900s. It was torched during the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre.
(📸: @joshua_lott )

A commemorative plaque, listing the store’s address as 121 1/2 N. Greenwood Ave., lies a few feet from the highway overpass. “Destroyed 1921,” it reads.

washingtonpost.com/business/2021/…

Her grandparents, who also owned a dance pavilion and skating rink, as well as a taxi service, rebuilt their business after the massacre but never amassed the same level of wealth.

Her grandfather, a college-educated shoemaker, suffered mental and emotional setbacks, leaving her grandmother to raise four children on her own. To survive, she ended up working as a domestic servant for a White family.

“If we had been able to receive some sort of reparations, we could be more of a partner in the revitalization going on right now,” Nails-Alford said. “But because we lost that economic advantage and it was never replaced, we don’t have those seats at the table.”

As Tulsa authorities provide millions in financial incentives to revitalize Greenwood ahead of this year’s centennial of the massacre, Black entrepreneurs say they are being threatened with erasure yet again. washingtonpost.com/business/2021/…

Some $42 million in city tax incentives and loans — race-blind under Oklahoma law — has largely benefited White-owned firms that won the majority of contracts to develop lucrative parcels closest to downtown. washingtonpost.com/business/2021/…

Guy Troupe, a Black entrepreneur, calls the “whitewashing” of
Black Wall Street “the final execution of a plan” set in motion by the 1921 massacre. Similar violence was unleashed against Black communities by White mobs across the country, often with the approval of local govt.

“It’s hard to stomach the idea that a museum and tourism will fix the challenges of systemic racism. I came to take back what’s rightfully ours,” said Troupe, 54, who opened Black Wall Street Liquid Lounge in January 2020. washingtonpost.com/business/2021/…

Tulsa officials say state law bars the city from considering race when it comes to development contracts.

But economists who study race and public policy say it is impossible to fix ingrained racial inequalities with race-neutral practices.

washingtonpost.com/business/2021/…

.@DarrickHamilton: There is no such thing as race-blind econ development. Capital itself positions people to take advantage of econ dev. And we have a history in which whatever capital Black people would have amassed was literally massacred in a terrorist uprising 100 yrs ago.

.@SandyDarity: “To the extent that race was used as a criteria for the exclusion and depression of Black achievement, how do you not use race as a corrective?” washingtonpost.com/business/2021/…

Black families have just over one-tenth the wealth of the typical White household — a gap that Darity said originated w/failure to provide Blacks with 40-acre land grants as restitution for their enslavement while giving 1.6 million Whites 160 acres under the Homestead Acts.

The wealth disparity was exacerbated by the massacres that occurred during the Jim Crow period, @SandyDarity said, resulting in not only the loss of Black lives but the “destruction and appropriation of Black property by White terrorists.”

The displacement of Black people from Greenwood did not end with the massacre. In the 1960s and ’70s, federally funded “urban renewal” programs led to the demolition of more Black homes and businesses for highway construction. washingtonpost.com/business/2021/…

Today, Black Tulsans are more than twice as likely as Whites to be unemployed. A third of Black Tulsans live in poverty, compared with 12 percent of Whites. And the typical Black family in Tulsa has a net worth of $8,000, compared with $145,000 for a typical White family.

Listen to our #PostReports discussion with @itsJhyphenM about Black entrepreneurs in Tulsa, a century after one of the nation’s worst acts of racial violence.

washingtonpost.com/podcasts/post-…