There are quite distinct historical processes that have created the wealth of some nations and the poverty of others; the enormous riches of some groups and the destitution of others. The intense inequality and adversity that we see today among African Americans and Native Americans have clear and undeniable historical antecedents. Colonial plunder, slavery, de jure discrimination, institutionalized racism in education and in the housing market, de facto discrimination in the work place—and the relentless violence which has been present every step of the way—have created entrenched, stubborn poverty and its staggering challenges.
There is a tremendous irony here, since these are the processes that were deliberately put in place to create the wealth of the colonial United States. Historians increasingly agree that the enslaved Africans worked on plantations carved out from lands cultivated by hundreds of generations of American Indians. These sacrifices produced the capital that was critical for the industrialization and economic development of the young nation. Economic historians compare the significance of cotton to the economy of the nineteenth century, to oil in our time. United States was the Saudi Arabia of cotton. Cotton was the most valuable export commodity that the United States produced. Twenty years before the Civil War, cotton made up 63 percent of the total value of exports. It connected the plantation economy to the Northern banking industry, ship building industry, insurance companies, investment houses, the textile factories in New England and Great Britain. And as Craig S. Wilder documents, some of the most revered universities—Brown, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Rutgers, Georgetown and many more—“were soaked in the sweat, tears and often blood” of slaves and Native Americans.
The legacy of historical racism created the bulwark of segregation—which continues to divide all Americans. More than fifty years after major civil rights legislation was enacted segregation remains stubbornly embedded in the social fabric of the country creating two nations separated by growing inequality, distrust and wariness.
Deindustrialization pulled the rug from under the communities of color. Between 1910 and 1979, almost half of all African Americans were working in industries. Segregation and racism were utterly suffocating, but as more Black men and women found work, it brought greater economic stability to their lives.