It’s hard for many people to understand why the massacres continue to have economic significance today, said Chris Messer, a sociology professor at Colorado State University-Pueblo. But the average American doesn’t have a grandparent or great-grandparent whose home was burned to the ground – and who received no insurance proceeds or government aid, he said. Black Americans who kept their cash at home – reluctant to put their money in White-owned banks – often lost their life savings and any other assets when their homes and businesses were destroyed or they had to flee to other communities, Messer said.
“There are plenty of really wealthy individuals in America today – they would not be wealthy if it weren’t for their parents being able to give them wealth or put them in a good school or hand their business down,” said Messer, who estimated that the property lost in the Tulsa massacre would come to $200 million based on today’s home values.
“Entire communities of people were being effectively reduced overnight to the lower class,” Messer told CNN. “They had to start completely over.”
The Tulsa riots led to a decline in homeownership, lower average occupational status and less educational attainment among Black residents of the city and throughout the state through 1940 at least, according to a research paper published last year by Nathan Nunn, a Harvard economics professor, and two other researchers. Among their findings: More Black women entered the labor force, possibly because they had to work to support themselves and their families after the massacre.
“The massacre put Black Americans living in Tulsa, or exposed to information about the massacres, on a different trajectory,” Nunn told CNN.
Additional findings show that the massacre’s effects on homeownership have lingered even longer. The share of Black Tulsans who live in homes that either they or their families own was 25 percentage points lower in 2000 than it would have been had the massacre not occurred, Nunn said.
The gap between Black and White homeownership remains wide today. About 74% of White people owned homes in the first quarter of 2021 versus 45% of Black people, according to census data. Elsewhere, riots led to a greater divide between the races that further hindered Black Americans from building wealth.
1919 was a particularly violent year, later known as Red Summer, with nearly a hundred lynchings and dozens of racially charged incidents. In Chicago, riots broke out in July 1919 after a Black teen on a raft drifted into a swimming area unofficially restricted to Whites. After he was killed, violence raged for days, which led to more formal separation between Blacks and Whites.