A Letter to My White Friends and Colleagues. Steven S. Rogers

⁶

Those men and women who did not escape death, like Northup, still had value. For example, it has recently been discovered that major medical schools used the corpses of Black enslaved people for research, anatomy classes, and dissection. This was called the “domestic cadaver trade” and participating schools included Harvard University, the University of Maryland, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Virginia. The prices paid for the cadavers, as reflected in the records of the schools that kept payment schedules, was $12 for adults, $15 for mothers and their infants, and $8 for children between the ages of 4 and 10. Often, these bodies were stolen from cemeteries.⁷

Another industry that profited from deceased Black enslaved people was the insurance industry. It was common for insurance companies to provide coverage to slave owners and slave ships. In the book Zong! by Canadian writer M. NourbeSe Philip, the author extrapolated from legal documents that 150 Africans on one slave ship were purposely drowned, so that the owners could collect insurance monies for the loss.⁸

Over 78 years after this horrific terminal fraud, Cudjo Lewis was reported to have been one of the last Africans transported to America as an enslaved man. He was one of the enslaved people on a ship called the Clotilda, which arrived in America in 1859, 50 years after the federal government had abolished the slave trade in this country.⁹ This was a federal crime.

After the human cargo of 110 Black men and women departed the ship, it was purposely burned and sunk. The Meaher family, who had financed the illegal kidnapping, had the ship destroyed so as not to retain evidence of their crime. But in 2019, the ship was discovered in the murky waters of Montgomery, Alabama, not far from where Lewis had deboarded 60 years earlier.¹⁰

After almost two and a half centuries of his people being held in bondage and working with no compensation, generation after generation, this is what Lewis said when informed that he was free, and no longer an enslaved man owned by Tim Meaher and his family:¹¹

      It April 12, 1865. De Yankee soldiers dey come down to de boat and eatee de mulberries off de trees. Den dey see us and say, “Y'all can't stay dere no mo'. You free, you doan b'long to nobody no mo. Oh, Lor'! I so glad. We astee de soldiers where we goin'? Dey say dey doan know. Dey told us to go where we feel lak goin', we ain' no mo' slave.

      Afterwards, Mr. Lewis had the following discussion with Tim Meaher, his former slave owner:

      Cap'n Tim, you brought us from our country where we had lan'. You made us slave. Now dey make us free but we ain' got no country and we ain' got no lan'! Why doan you give us piece dis land so we kin buildee ourself a home? Cap'n jump on his feet and say, “Fool do you think I goin' give you property on top of property? I tookee good keer my slaves and derefo' I doan owe dem nothin. You doan belong to me now, why must I give you my lan'?

In 2020, on a segment on the television show 60 Minutes about discovering the sunken Clotilda slave ship, it was reported that the Meaher family, descendants of “Cap'n Tim,” owns land, businesses, and other assets worth over $26 million.¹²

This unwillingness to help the newly freed people, during what author Saidiya Hartman called “the afterlife of slavery” was a common refrain by individuals, as well as the government. Field Order No. 15 was issued in January 1865. This military order was intended to take 400,000 acres of land confiscated from confederate soldiers who were found guilty of treason and to disperse it to people who were formerly enslaved.¹³ Unfortunately, President Andrew Johnson said this was advantaging Blacks over Whites and that it was time for Blacks to fend for themselves. In a speech he said, “It is earnestly hoped that instead of wasting away they will by their own efforts establish for themselves a condition of respectability and prosperity.”¹⁴

      We see that decisions refusing to share wealth, combined with the financial benefits of slavery going to Whites exclusively, generation after generation, is the foundation of the wealth gap between Blacks and Whites. This unbridged chasm started over 400 years ago.

Beginning as an enslaved people without the right to earn a living or accrue wealth from their work or to transfer any acquired wealth over 12 succeeding generations has left many of the country's Black Americans in a chronic perpetual state of poverty, making it almost impossible to generate financial independence or create a viable community economy to parallel that of White Americans. A perfect example of this disparity plague is the city of Boston, where a 2017 study showed the average White household had a net worth of almost $250,000 compared to a net worth of $8 for Blacks (the noted amount is not an error).¹⁵

Even more disturbing has been the reaction from Whites whenever there have been instances of Black success that could become the basis of wealth generation. One of the most prominent examples is the 1921 story of Tulsa, Oklahoma's “Black Wall Street” when a mob of White citizens destroyed the city's Black business community in a terrorist attack that witnessed the first aerial bombardment of American citizens on U.S. soil.¹⁶ While this story of the destruction of 600 Black businesses is well known in the Black community, a recent survey by NBC news in Chicago reported that 94% of Whites had never heard of this event.

      Racial inequities create systemic cracks in the structural strength of our country. They result in health issues, social problems, reduced happiness, and diminished economic growth. Wealth inequality is one of the roots of systemic racial problems, because wealth is a resource that provides the basis for financial security (short and long term) and political power. Wealth provides individuals, families, and groups with the power of mobility and a sense of agency because it is a strength developed across lifetimes and handed down through generations. And in addition to being a systemic issue, wealth inequality is a generational problem, undermining any foundation for the stability of the Black community, and for America.

      How do we make America fulfill the dream first envisioned in Thomas Jefferson's Declaration of Independence? How do we reclaim the America that was betrayed in that great compromise of 1787, when the Constitution was created and excluded Blacks from a timelier participation in this great experiment? The solutions I offer in this book focus on seeking financial equity. Black Americans were officially excluded from wealth generation for 246 years through government-sanctioned slavery and over 100 years of other anti-Black public policies. Therefore, we need to take extraordinary steps – even more radical than what was true of affirmative action – to correct the wrong. As Nikole Hannah-Jones of the New York Times said, “All of this inequality was intentionally constructed. Therefore, all of it can be intentionally deconstructed.”

So, what is the road forward? What can be done to undo the financial apartheid that has resulted in Whites having 10 times the net worth of Blacks? Just as Nelson Mandela and willing White Afrikaaners helped South Africa avoid social disruption that was broiling increasingly hotter in their country, we need similar leadership. I know that the problems include issues with the police, but my focus is on what I believe is an equally important cause of the protests, and that is the wealth disparity. Therefore, you, my White colleagues in the business community, are needed to help diffuse the pressures that drive the wealth disparities that contributed to the past riots and fuel the current protests that are breaking out with increasing frequency in 21st-century America.

To the White