Building Community Wealth: learning from Durham’s Black Wall Street
Historic Community Wealth Building activity is often hidden, and, when revealed, highlights what our economy could become, as well as the cumulative injustices which are often arrayed against it. This is evident in the history of Durham’s “Black Wall Street” -a nineteenth century antidote to racism and financial oppression. Recently, I was standing in an art space on Parrish Street in Durham, North Carolina, listening to Amos Cooper of Black Robin Ventures and Tobias Rose of Kompleks Creative. They were recounting the history of Durham and the ongoing challenges and living legacy of racism and injustice that the Black Wall Street story embodies. And you could feel the tremendous weight of that history in all that is yet to be overcome.
I was in Durham attending the New Growth Innovation Network’s City Scape Summit, and was on a study tour hearing about the revitalization of Downtown Durham and, in particular, ‘Black Wall Street’ - a term coined in the 1950s in recognition of the many Black-owned and -benefiting financial institutions in the area. In the Reconstruction Era, this area became an economic powerhouse for Black communities, including the North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company - the largest Black-owned insurance company in the United States (founded in 1898) and the the city’s first Black-owned bank, the Mechanics and Farmers Bank (M&F, founded in 1907), which extended loans to Durham’s Black residents when they couldn’t receive financing from established white-owned institutions. Indeed as chart below shows, immediately after Emancipation, the white to Black racial wealth gap in the U.S. was nearly 60 to 1. By 1920, it was 10 to 1, and by 1950 it was 7 to 1.
U.S. White-Black Wealth Gap, 1860-2020
Source: Derenoncourt et al, “Wealth of Two Nations: The U.S. Racial Wealth Gap, 1860-2020,” https://economics.princeton.edu/working-papers/wealth-of-two-nations-the-u-s-racial-wealth-gap-1860-2020/ (Tab: T Racial Wealth), reproduced in Index of Systemic Trends, 2nd edition, The Democracy Collaborative, (2024, forthcoming)
And it wasn’t just financial institutions that made Black Wall Street a local community wealth hub. Its proximity to the black neighborhood of Hayti meant that a whole local community ecosystem of Black-owned companies, stores, restaurants and theaters developed and grew. Born out of segregation, Black Wall Street helped economically insulate the community from the viciousness and racialized exclusion of Jim Crow-era America, allowing capital, wealth and investment to flow to local talent, creativity, and innovation. It was a product of oppression and by necessity was deeply relational to place and to people’s lives within it.
Durham’s Black Wall Street was part of a burgeoning movement of similar initiatives across the country, including Greenwood in Tulsa, OK; Jackson Ward, Richmond, VA; The Fourth Avenue District in Birmingham, AL; and Bronzeville in Chicago. In all of these examples, there was a natural point of decline due to desegregation, but more often they were actively squashed by reactionary forces. Most infamously, in Greenwood, Tulsa in 1921, a hate-driven white mob, angry at the economic success of blacks in the area, used dynamite and lynchings to destroy the district’s 35 square blocks and kill an estimated 300 people. In Jackson Ward the demise was less brutal, but no less complete when the all-white City Council’s plan for revitalization targeted the area. Plans to build federal housing saw only 25 of the neighborhood’s existing families permitted to remain in the 297 units that replaced the 200 homes that were torn down. The end to Jackson Ward’s economic vibrancy was complete when the all-white Virginia State Assembly voted to run a section of an interstate through the neighborhood in the 1950s - a familiar story of racist urban development from New York to California. In Durham, where Black Wall Street was already declining after desegregation, urban renewal signaled its ultimate demise when a freeway was built in the 1970s, bisecting the community and destroying community life.
However, the story does not end there, in grinding frustration and defeat. Tobias and Amos, along with their organizations and many others in Durham, have carried the legacy of Black Wall Street forward into the present. There are now six bronze sculptures lining Parrish Street in the heart of the old Black Wall Street district, tracing and interpreting its historic significance, and in 2013 the city erected the Black Wall Street Plaza. There is also the Black Wall Street Legacy Project, designed to preserve and promote the district's history. And today the number of Black-owned businesses in Durham County is buoyant, with an increase of 56 percent in just the last five years.
In Durham, as in so many other locations across the United States, we are seeing the spread of local economic inclusion initiatives, sometimes under the banner of Community Wealth Building, designed to create greater economic ownership and control. The need for economic democracy and justice never dies as racialized inequality and poverty has continued and worsened while historic injustices have yet to be righted.
I think the history of Black Wall Street offers a glimpse of what could be, together with salutary lessons to be learned, for our movement. Born out of deep injustice, Black Wall Streets were relatively isolated attempts to improve the economic fortunes of Black people and create culturally specific and relational economies. For a time they were successful, and could have grown even further but for racism, elite wealth capture, and brutal and violent political repression and disempowerment. Economic ownership, local control, and the power it gives to communities was and continues to be vulnerable to attack from existing power and elite wealth.
Today the forces that wish to squash and stymie such forms of Community Wealth Building are perhaps less overt, but no less powerful and damaging. Attempts to create an economy that truly works for communities and redresses wealth extraction are often actively suppressed under the monopolistic tendencies of big financial institutions. Development decisions are still made in the interests of big Wall Street capital and finance and not local communities and businesses. Indeed, economic injustice is sadly far too prevalent, and even today the Black economy is still chronically underinvested in with only 1% of venture-backed founders Black and the wealth of the typical Black family ($44,900) is only about 15 percent of the typical White family ($285,000).
As we struggle with racial, democratic, environmental and economic injustices, there are things from the past which we must learn. The history of Black Wall Streets tells us that genuine Community Wealth Building will only succeed when narrow economic ownership, concentrated wealth, and elite power are confronted directly and displaced or defeated. Only then will we see an economy that truly works for us. The spirit exemplified in Durham’s Black Wall Street shows us that we can build an economy that is truly intimate and relational to culture, the environment, and the specific economic needs of the communities in which we live. And that is something to fight for - and to cherish!
Neil McInroy is Global Lead for Community Wealth Building at The Democracy Collaborative
Image:Alexisrael, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Black_Wall_Street_Durham.JPG
