This story originally aired on “Marketplace Morning Report” on May 20. Listen to Marketplace Morning Report weekdays at 5:51 and 7:51 a.m. on KGOU.
Five years after the killing of George Floyd — which drew heightened attention from government and corporate America to racial inequality — there’s evidence that the wealth gap between Black and White Americans has actually widened.
The median Black family holds about 15% as much wealth as the typical white family: $44,900 versus $285,000 in total assets, according to the Federal Reserve’s 2022 Survey of Consumer Finances. The gap between white and Black families increased by around $50,000 between 2019 and 2022.
Over generations, Black Americans have been blocked from acquiring and passing on homes, businesses and the wealth they represent: by Jim Crow violence and segregation and, after World War II, by highway-building and urban renewal that ravaged thriving Black neighborhoods.
That played out in Tulsa, Oklahoma, as it did in many other American cities. After one of the worst incidents of racial violence in American history devastated Tulsa’s thriving Black neighborhood in the early 1920s, the community rebuilt, only to be ravaged again by displacement and disinvestment several decades later.
In 2020, only about 32% of Black families owned their own homes in Tulsa, versus 60% of white families, according to a report on racial equality published by the City of Tulsa. That difference is even wider than the racial homeownership gap nationwide — which was 45% compared to 75% in 2022, according to the Fed’s SCF.
A visit to Vernon AME Church in Tulsa’s historic Greenwood district reveals some of the history behind that inequality. The neighborhood was known as “Black Wall Street” in the early 1900s.
At the church’s Easter Sunday service this past April, the pews in the stately main sanctuary were mostly filled with Black families listening to passionate preaching and gospel singing. Many of the congregants are elderly and have been coming to the church since they were children.
Today, the stately brick church is surrounded by vacant land, parking lots and a freeway overpass — there’s not a house or a shop in the immediate vicinity.
Back in the early 1920s, Vernon AME was at the heart of a booming Black neighborhood just north of Tulsa’s white-dominated downtown business district. (The dividing line for racial segregation at the time was the Frisco railroad tracks at the southern edge of Greenwood). Known as Deep Greenwood, the area around Vernon AME was packed with hundreds of Black-owned stores, theatres, hotels and workshops, many servicing Oklahoma’s lucrative oil boom. More than 10,000 people lived in the area, and many in homes they owned or rented from Black landlords.
On May 31 and June 1, 1921, a white mob — sanctioned and armed by city officials — invaded Greenwood, looting and burning most of the neighborhood. As many as 300 residents were killed, some buried in unmarked mass graves. Some Black residents of Greenwood survived what came to be known as the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921 by hiding in the basement at Vernon AME, while the church above them was burned to the ground.
There are congregants today who remember the impact. One of them is 80-year-old Ruth Boulware Harrison. Harrison’s mother had two brothers, Abe and John. “They had homes destroyed during the race riot. Abe — we never knew what happened to him. Presumably, he was killed.”
But in time, the community reconstructed itself. It was a struggle. Insurance claims for property losses — estimated in the hundreds of millions in current dollars — were largely denied, as the event was declared a “riot” by local newspapers and officials, and blamed on Black residents.
Still, “even after the massacre, we rebuilt,” said Kristi Williams, another Vernon AME congregant and descendant of survivors, who has served on Tulsa’s Beyond Apology Commission, researching reparations for Tulsa’s Black community.
“How did that happen?” asked Williams. “By the 1920s, we had over 50 Black townships in Oklahoma. And it was those Black townships that helped us to rebuild. We owned land. And on a lot of that land there was oil. That land was what made Greenwood.”
Eventually, Greenwood was thriving again, said Karlos Hill, professor of African American Studies at the University of Oklahoma. “Twenty years later, by 1940, there are more Black people in Greenwood, there are more businesses than there had been in 1921.”
Ruth Boulware Harrison lived through this second Black economic boom. She said that in the 1940s, “my father, Ben Boulware, and my mother, Tanolia Boulware, owned a store called One Stop, where you could get everything that you wanted — the meat market, fresh food, canned goods. He had juke joints. He had a brother who he put in business in another store in Greenwood.”
But their prosperity and the Black prosperity around them didn’t last. In the early 1950s, a new federal highway — I-244 — cut right through Greenwood. It separated the core of the Black business district adjacent to downtown, from Vernon AME Church and the more residential Black neighborhoods to the north.
The family lost their home and store to eminent domain, along with rental apartments they owned. “The businesses, the people, moved out,” Harrison remembered. “And it just became a desert. I can remember being the last house on the block, how the dogs would run in packs and you had to be so very careful. When I think of my uncles that had homes back in the ‘20s, my father who built homes for others, where is the heritage? What did we get from it?”
Tulsa City Councilwoman Vanessa Hall-Harper represents North Tulsa, where most of the displaced Black families moved. Economically, it never really recovered.
Hall-Harper calls the construction of the interstate “the second destruction.”
“They used the highway system to do that,” Hall-Harper said. “Tulsa is just one of many.”
Like Miami, where I-95 slashed through Overtown, known as the “Harlem of the South.” And Nashville, where I-40 took out the city’s Black business district. The list goes on, said Rice University sociologist Elizabeth Roberto.
“Highways, urban renewal projects — they were more likely to be displacing a prosperous Black neighborhood,” Roberto said.
She said highways and other big infrastructure were also used to impose or extend racial segregation, “creating basically a wall between a white neighborhood and a Black neighborhood, such as in Chicago on the South Side.”
Lately, this lost Black prosperity has gotten some increased political attention.
The 2021 Infrastructure Bill included $2.5 billion to plan and rebuild highways, parks and street grids that harmed disadvantaged communities. Tulsa got $1.6 million to study solutions.
But as for money to repair the economic damage, Hall-Harper said: “We have not seen anything significant.” Whether they will — in Tulsa or elsewhere — is in doubt.
The Trump administration and Republicans in Congress have targeted those Biden-era racial-equity-in-infrastructure programs for cancellation.
