Historian Manning Marable has lamented that “the most striking fact about American economic history and politics is the brutal and systemic underdevelopment of black people.”18 When the Emancipation Proclamation was signed in 1863, the black community owned a total of 0.5 percent of the total wealth in the United States. This number is not surprising; slaves were forbidden to own anything, and the few freed blacks living in the North had few opportunities to accumulate wealth. What is staggering is that more than 150 years later, that number has barely budged—blacks still own only about 1
...more
