The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap

by Mehrsa Baradaran

Thomas Watson, leader of the southern Populist Party, explained that white supremacy was a deception that blinded the poor and pitted them against each other in order to perpetuate “a monetary system which beggars you both.” The Populists urged “color tenants” to stand with white tenants and promised that the People’s Party would “wipe out the color line and put every man on his citizenship irrespective of color.”158 The Populists went further than all the other parties, including the Republican Party, with respect to racial equality. “I am in favor of giving the colored man full representation,” said the president of the Populist convention in Texas. “He is a citizen just as much as we are, and the party that acts on that fact will gain the colored vote of the south.”