Can reparations shrink the Black wealth gap in Tulsa?
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Hey everyone, I'm Rima Grace. Welcome back to Making Me Smart, where we make today make sense.

And I'm Kimberly Adams. Today is Thursday, June the 12th. Now, Juneteenth is coming up next week. And since we're going to be on holiday and we won't have a new show, we wanted to take this opportunity today to talk about the black wealth gap in the United States. Because even after calls to address economic injustice after the murder of George Floyd in 2020, the wealth gap between black and white Americans is actually just getting wider.

Yeah. And our colleague here at Marketplace, Mitchell Hartman, has been doing some incredible reporting lately on how Black wealth was built up and then torn down in one city in Tulsa, Oklahoma, which was devastated by the Tulsa race massacre back in 1921.

And I'm actually here right now with him in studio at Oregon Public Broadcasting. We're in like a little small space. Hey, Mitchell. Hey, it's good to be here. Hi, Kimberly. Hey, Mitchell. So your reporting took you to a Tulsa neighborhood called Greenwood that used to be known as America's Black Wall Street neighborhood.

Can you just tell us about Greenwood and why it was given that nickname? Yeah. And actually, I'm going to start at the sort of moment in my reporting in Tulsa that really sort of shocked me and brought everything home to me at the same time, just outside of the little black business district that is what is left of Tulsa's black Wall Street of the 1920s. And

Painted on a building side, I saw a mural that said, Mass graves this way with an arrow. I followed the sign, Downroad 66, to the old town cemetery. It's called Greenwood Cemetery. And in part of that are these burial sites that just basically say, unmarked grave, mass

of victim of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre. There are at least 60, maybe more, unmarked graves there. It's believed that about 300 people were killed in the massacre. 10,000

Thousand people were made homeless. 1,200 buildings were destroyed, homes, churches, you know, a hospital, and lots of businesses. Can you tell us about what kind of lasting impact it had on the community? What's left of that Black Wall Street is this little business district. It has some vacant buildings. It has all these plaques in the sidewalk that say things like, you know,

Rails, you know, shoe shop was here, burned down in the 1921 massacre. Shoe shine, hotel, theater. And after Greenwood had been totally destroyed, burned to the ground by this white mob, the

And miraculously, the community rebuilt again. It wasn't as vibrant. It wasn't as profitable and prosperous as it had been. But it got pretty close. It's kind of amazing because the businesses, the people who live there got no insurance anymore.

You know, payments, they got absolutely no state or city assistance. They got no reparations of any kind. They rebuilt partly because a lot of the business owners had other businesses in other black townships, these free black townships around Oklahoma. And then the highway comes through and again, basically ruins this neighborhood.

This highway situation, that is really interesting because you've reported that this is kind of a pattern throughout a lot of cities in the United States. How so? And how has that affected black wealth?

Yeah, it is. It happened in Miami, Nashville, L.A., Chicago. It happened here in Portland. Basically, as the federal highway program building was getting underway, the urban planners looked at cities where these highways needed to come through. And, you know, they plotted it through neighborhoods that they thought could be protected.

destroyed that were essentially, you know, expendable to build the highways. And what they did is they, you know, would take a swath of land, I don't know, a half mile wide or something. That happened in Tulsa. It happened in all these places. And it often went right through the black commercial district. Right.

You know, people objected at the time. They said it would be really destructive and that it would displace families. And that's what happened in Tulsa. Black families were displaced to North Tulsa, a place that didn't have businesses, many of them. It didn't have other services and it had poor housing because the city was still segregated. And that's still true today. North Tulsa is much poorer, poorer.

Home ownership for blacks was equal, essentially, to whites in 1921. It's much, much lower now. And so we see all of that deprivation of prosperity and wealth and intergenerational wealth happens once in 1921, again in the 60s, 50s, 60s and 70s. And, you know, we still see the effects today.

Well, I want to talk about reparations. You mentioned it earlier. So I know that Tulsa's mayor recently announced $105 million reparations package to address the long-term impacts of the Tulsa race massacre. That's a big deal. It's a really big deal. And, you know, local residents, there are still many, many families that are descended from people who died.

You know, uncle lost a home and they never found his body, for instance. The local advocates have been trying to get some measure of evidence.

So Mitchell, what's actually in this package? The new mayor, he's the city's first black mayor, announced more than $100 million in

for repair. He doesn't call it reparations. And it's essentially private money. It'll be in a charitable trust raised presumably from mostly private sources. The goal is to spend about $25 million on affordable housing and to boost home ownership, another $60 million for historic preservation in

Black Wall Street, the Greenwood neighborhood, around $20 million for scholarships, also small business grants, and also money to keep trying to identify the original victims of the massacre, presumably in those mass graves in the city's cemetery. So like Kimberly mentioned earlier, in the wake of the murder of George Floyd, there were a lot of promises made to address economic injustice there.

But, you know, the wealth gap between black and white Americans has only gotten bigger. Do you feel like the reparations program, even though they're not calling it that, do you think it could mark some kind of turning point? You know, the people who have been advocating for this for years and years are

Actually sound really optimistic. I don't think they think in Tulsa it is going to equalize wealth and, you know, community assets. I mean, that is such a deep and longstanding problem, but.

It goes a long way, partly symbolically. I mean, $100 million is a lot of money. It's also symbolic that it's the first money that has ever been pledged and is going to actually go to reparations. I think that the two survivors have gotten a little bit of money from like private donors in New York or something. But so that really makes a difference. You know, whether it will start to, you know, improve black homeownership or, you know,

give better housing to more people, make that more available, whether they'll actually be more Black-owned businesses. You know, I think that's going to take a long time. And where we've seen reparations elsewhere, it's also really, it's symbolic, but it's really small amounts of money. I mean, I think in Evanston, Illinois, it's like $25,000 per home, you know, per person or per household. Right.

In Evanston, Illinois, I mean, housing is incredibly expensive there.

Well, we really appreciate your reporting and really glad we could have you on today. Mitchell Hartman, you are a reporter here at Marketplace, and I'm so glad we got to do this in person, too. Yeah, it's great. Yeah, thanks, Mitchell. You guys should all go back and listen to Mitchell's stories. They are great and deeply reported, and it's been interesting since he did that reporting that that $105 million package, which includes a bunch of different components of using a mix of sort of

public resources and private funds, as Mitchell was just describing, to try to address some of these things, but especially in this moment when there's so much pushback against air quote DEI and reparations. It'll be fascinating to see how this plays out and whether or not this model gets duplicated. Yeah. The thing I keep thinking about when I, you know, hearing Mitchell and then also when I was doing some reading about this earlier, it's

It got me thinking more generally about how we remember and memorialize events that have very real, harsh economic and psychological impacts on a community. Because, you know, and I feel like these events, the violence, the erasure, the displacement, create a real collective loss that trickles down through generations in ways that I think from the outside can be hard to grasp or really quantify. And...

Something I think about a lot is that with these events, real people lose their lives, right? Homes are destroyed. Blocks are razed. And on top of that intense trauma and destruction, you've got a generation of people who've now switched into survival mode, who might be now afraid to take risks. And I guess what I'm trying to say is that the impacts of something like this don't fade with time. Because I think it is easy for someone maybe to look at a story like this and be like, why are we still talking about this? Like, what's... But...

It does show up, I think, in more insidious and quieter ways in the policy decisions and the wealth gap that we're talking about or in mistrust in institutions. So, yeah, I really appreciate Mitchell bringing this conversation onto the show. Yeah, for sure. All right. I think we are done for today. Tomorrow, we're going to do Economics on Tap. That is the YouTube live stream that starts at 3.30 Pacific, 6.30 Eastern. Be sure to join us. We'll wrap up the week with some news and drinks and a game, the usual stuff.

Make Me Smart is produced by Courtney Bergseger, and today's program was engineered by Juan Carlos Dorado. Daisy Palacios is our supervising senior producer. Nancy Fargali is executive producer of Marketplace Shows. And Joanne Griffith is our chief content officer. Hey, David Brancaccio here. Over the last few months, you may have heard me talk about the home that my family lost in the California wildfires this year.

Well, I recently chatted about rebuilding our Altadena, California, cottage with the team over at This Old House Radio Hour, a radio program and a podcast from American Public Media. So for a tale of new beginnings or if you need any tips for your own home improvement projects, this episode has you covered. You can find episodes of This Old House Radio Hour wherever you get your podcasts.