LogFAQs > #954404095

ImAMarvel posted...

Yeah, for sure. Multiple times in American history, there were opportunities for blacks to move upward on the socioeconomic ladder before white supremacists sabotaged their efforts to keep us in poverty. Just look at post-Reconstruction politics, Jim Crow, and the War on Drugs.

The 100 year anniversary of the Tulsa massacre is on Monday. A lot of people were surprised that their first intro to this was in shows like The Watchmen and LoveCraft. I never learned about it in school but I was always interested in reading about history and knew about it since I was in middle school.

There were dozens of majority black towns, townships, neighborhoods like Greenwood (Tulsa) that were prosperous and self sufficient. Like Greenwood they got snuffed out by white supremacists and the inhabitants were killed and displaced, losing the land, businesses, banks in addition to life. The Wilmington, NC insurrection of 1898 was just one example, the black residents of Wilmington at that time had it going on. They had businesses, positions in government, at that time there were more literate black residents in Wilmington than white residents. Many people were killed during the insurrection and ran out of town, never to return. That kind of stuff has generational impact. Today black residents of Wilmington have a 41 percent poverty rate, and over a century later there is an understood rule that if you have aspirations to make it and have a chance to make a good living you have to get out of Wilmington.

Any kind of social or economic progress for black people in America has seen an immediate backlash from white supremacists, history is rife with examples.


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"We tried to tell y'all."
- African-American proverb