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Calvin Schermerhorn, "The Plunder of Black America: How the Racial Wealth Gap Was Made" (Yale UP, 2025)
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Dr. Calvin Schermerhorn
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Dr. Zachary Williams
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Dr. Calvin Schermerhorn
We save. That may have been too much feeling.
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Liberty Mutual Spokesperson
Only pay for what you need@libertymutual.com Liberty Liberty Liberty Liberty Savings vary underwritten by Liberty Mutual Insurance Company and affiliates. Excludes Massachusetts. This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Fiscally responsible financial geniuses, Monetary magicians. These are things people say about drivers who switch their car insurance to Progressive and save hundreds. Visit progressive.com to see if you could save Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states or situations.
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Marshall Poe
Hello everybody, this is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form and we can talk.
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Dr. Calvin Schermerhorn
Talk.
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Marshall Poe
Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Dr. Zachary Williams
Good afternoon. My name is Dr. Zachary Williams and I'm host for the New Books Network. And I have the honor and privilege of speaking with Dr. Calvin Schermerhorn, professor at Arizona State University, professor of History in the School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies at Arizona state. And Dr. Schermer Horn is author of the Business of Slavery and the Rise of American capitalism, 1815-1860. And we're here today to talk about his most recent book, the Plunder of Black How Racial Wealth Gap Was Made. And in it Dr. Schermer horn covered some significant subjects and research and overall gives a long history of the racial wealth gap in America, told through the stories of seven black families who struggle to build wealth over multiple generations. Other themes and thoughts that have covered the dispossession of wealth is continual over a sort of generational basis, taking into thought legal, political and social forces. Wealth largely in property and housing. And the barriers are shifting over time, even with a lot of different changes and transitions in sort of historical and formational forces in the United States. And there are intergenerational effects, and there. And there are also other conclusions that have sort of, sort of implications on what's going on today with regard to the wealth gap, other economic and social matters as it relates to conditions of, you know, the wealth of African Americans and the country in and of itself. So without further ado, want to welcome you, Dr. Schermerhorn, and thank you for being willing to speak with us today on the New Books Network. Could you just tell us a little bit about your work and what motivated you to write the Plunder of Black America and why now?
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Dr. Calvin Schermerhorn
Thank you, Dr. Williams, for that generous introduction. So the. The leading contention of the book is that if we really want to understand racial inequality in the United States, we need to look past politics. We need to look past the discussions about diversity, equity, inclusion, what are the metrics, how do we understand this? And so the book argues that wealth is the leading indicator of black white inequality in the United States. And so the statistic that's kind of out there in front is that for every dollar owned by a white household in the United States, a Black household owns 16 sets, and that's rounding up. So, and the bigger picture is that black Americans didn't lose or squander their wealth on the ongoing road from enslavement to equality. Instead, each time the American economy changed, agents of that changed, agents of that change invented new ways of dispossessing, disinheriting, or decapitalizing African Americans. And Frederick Douglass called this plunder in the 19th century. And so the book really goes back to the beginning, to the. The early 17th century in Virginia, and looks at how that process unfolds. And it stands on the shoulders of a lot of research in sociology and economics, and I'm grateful for that. But the idea is to tell the human story, because usually we can understand this by saying, well, the disparity in wealth is a function of education inequality, or it's a function of residential segregation and the long legacy of redlining. And lending discrimination or its health disparity, or its problems with opening the gates to employment. But if we look at the stories of these families, we can see how all of those things worked together to make those advantages durable, interlocking, and to see how they transformed over time. I teach American history. I've been doing this for 17 years at Arizona State, and, and one of the persistent narratives of the United States is that we're making progress. Sometimes it's two steps ahead and one step back. Sometimes we think of revolutionary progress, say emancipation in 1865. And by 1868, states like South Carolina that had been majority black, majority enslaved just 10 years before enfranchised black men elevated people of African descent to state houses, to officialdom, started lending. This is not a new story. W.E.B. du Bois talked about this 90 years ago in Black Reconstruction. But we tend to think, okay, well, there was the setback with Jim Crow, but then we had the civil rights revolution, the second, you know, the second Reconstruction. And there may have been some setbacks, but the new economy is coming toward, you know, coming to us. But what the book says is if we step back far enough and look long enough through that history, we can see that these structural impediments change and transform. So even in times of revolutionary steps forward, we still see the obstacles, the, the, the discrimination, the. The impediments to building wealth and climbing up the social ladder being reinvented. So every time, in every era, when these families overcame those structural impediments, another one snapped right into place. And so it kind of complicates that in that sense.
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Dr. Zachary Williams
How does your book build on your previous work on American slavery and capitalism? And how does it even sort of take that sort of work further? And how does your sort of narrative focus on seven families in seven different generations? And they are put together, particular narratives and particular experiences. How does it help to sort of shape this broader narrative of families and the racial wealth gap and opportunities that were promised or hoped for? And actually what actually takes place? And how does it situate us or bring us to this point today where there's such a wide gap? Some reports think a number of years ago said that roughly it would take about 225 years for African American families to catch up with the rest of, you know, the country? And so how does that gap get so large over such a expansive period of time?
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Dr. Calvin Schermerhorn
Yeah, thank you for. For asking that question. In the previous research on the business of slavery and the processes of early United States capitalism, I ran into this endpoint every History has a story arc. There's a beginning, a middle, and an end. And for those who study enslavement, the end is usually emancipation or a little bit of reconstruction. And then we assume something else happens. And we see this in the historical literature, right? We've got freedom, we've got Juneteenth, we've got. Then the assumption is that the economy, while not, you know, really fair, at least holds out the opportunity for an economic fair shake. And if we go back and look at the histories of the family of someone like Oprah Winfrey, whose great ex, you know, times three, grandfather did it, made it up, you know, got out of sharecropping, built that wealth, and eventually her family was able to escape, and she, you know, became who she is today. She was the first African American billionaire, I believe. So we tend to have that assumption. By the same token, those who study reconstruction and those who tell the stories of, say, the great Migration, the warmth of other suns, have this idea that slavery was a certain thing. It's kind of like a black box. And then once that. Once that ends, you know, we. We have a different story. So by taking the story arc all the way back to, you know, the founding to the early 17th century, we can see how there isn't this radical change over these. Over these generations and over these eras, but that, you know, as the old saying goes, history rhymes, right? We see new iterations of the old processes. In 1865, Frederick Douglass looked around and he said, in what new skin will the old snake come forth? And he was talking about politics and exclusion, but I think it equally applies to economics. And so what I wanted to do is to say, all right, what are the afterlives of enslavement? What's the afterlives of having 200 plus years of each generation starting with zero wealth? And so to try and tell that story, I want to go back and say, well, there are different eras. So the first era, the era of arrivals of people who are bound on slave ships across the Atlantic, who arrive on these shores, whether it's in the Chesapeake or in New England, is that their lives were characterized by dispossession. And that's what they had to work against. They're losing ancestral wealth back in Angola, back in those polities of West Africa. They're arriving with nothing, and not just nothing, with an unpayable debt of enslavement. Now, those who are in this period manage to pay that unpayable debt. They managed to slip those chains. They managed to become Free and start becoming earners, income generators. They built up wealth. The first three chapters cover these families. In the first case, Mary and Anthony Johnson, who were captives in Angola, who arrived in early colonial Virginia, who became planters, who became themselves enslavers. There's Megan Venture Smith, both of whom knew the inside of a slave ship, were enslaved on Fisher's island in the colony of New York before becoming free in Connecticut. There was Morris, who was enslaved in. In the tidewater of Virginia, who wash. George Washington spied as a very shrewd manager, right, who worked his way. He never worked his way out of slavery, but he's worked his way a little bit up the social ladder. So those. Those families had to work against dispossession. Their inheritors, their children and grandchildren had to work against what I call disinheritance. And that is, when you reproduce slavery, it's not simply this condition of ownership or mastery, what we usually think about, but for the families themselves, it was zero wealth and often kinlessness. Your human capital is stolen, too. So when we look at the US Constitution, and the original Constitution didn't mention slavery, it mentioned those who owe service, right? And so, okay, that's a very shrewd and precise way of saying that is your inheritance. So when we think about the radicalism of the American Revolution, the broadening out of the democratic entitlements of those people who became citizens who had once been subjects, that's not happening for most of black America, for the nine out of 10 people who are enslaved. And so if we look at that process, that process of disinheritance, you know, this is a pretty long story before we get to 1865. And so then what comes next? The sequel is what I call decapitalization, that every time that freedom generation and their descendants amass a little bit of wealth, they get a little bit of land, they get a little bit of property, they climb a few rungs up the social ladder. The architects of the new economy, the new iteration of the American landscape of opportunity throws up barriers. And so we have the descendants of Martha Bentley and Henry Goings, who were enslaved in Maryland, Virginia, eventually Georgia, taken all over the South. They escaped to Canada. They had five children. While free people in Canada, all five kids moved back to the United States. Four of them eventually landed in Grand Rapids, Michigan, which by the late 19th century was just about the best place you could hope to land. It was a ground zero of the American industrial revolution, along with New York and Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia. But Grand Rapids was home To a furniture industry. They called it Furniture City. It was home to the first multi user hydroelectric power plant. It was home to all kinds of manufacturing, industrial design. And the descendants of Martha and Henry Going, especially Harriet and Jack Adams, tried to seize their opportunity in this place. And for a while, it succeeded. Jack Adams became a mason in a place that was doubling its population every generation. Harriet didn't have to work herself, but her children went into business. But then the old snake came forth in a new skin. And so even though Jack and Harriet Adams as kids, when they were born, they could live anywhere they wanted. In, in Grand Rapids, residential segregation started to creep up, right. They found that the career ladders were artificially shored. They couldn't go to nursing school. They couldn't go and get the education that would unlock the doors to opportunity. And so by the time the third generation is starting out in freedom, they found themselves redlined. Lending was unavailable. They're living in a part of town that is that the leaders are very self consciously divesting from. They have a hard time making it up the social ladder. Even though one of the, one of these grandchildren actually went to the same high school, South High School as the future president, Gerald R. Ford. Ford got that ticket to the University of Michigan, which was desegregated at the time, but still hard to get into. He went to Yale Law School. He came back and practiced law and became, you know, the, has the storied political career. But the descendants of the Goings family hit this, this artificially low silo. And so that's what we're talking about. They couldn't get jobs in sales because door to door sales required knocking on white people's doors. And that's not allowed the federal government, when it gets into the business of subsidizing the enormous expansion of the middle class after the Great Depression, locks black folks out of suburbs. And once you're locked out of places of opportunity, it's very hard to take those escalators up, to get into those good schools, just to have that security that comes with health and public amenities and shopping and all the things that we might associate with the good life. And then, lo and behold, the businesses come to the suburbs. So when we look forward in time to the rise of Phoenix, where I'm talking to you from, as a major industrial and high tech area, There was no history of slavery, even though there was cotton here in the valley of the Sun. The architects of this new metropolis, the architects of sunbelt capitalism, reinvented this process that decapitalized African Americans. And so the story follows the Ragsdale family who were pioneering both in business and also in the civil rights revolution. And you can see their, their names are all over, all over Phoenix. But they had a very hard time keeping up with white business people who had every advantage of lending, of having homes that appreciated in value and having. Being able to send their kids to school. So it's, it's really the story of how these, how this, these interlocking features of discrimination and decapitalization get reinvented over time.
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Liberty Mutual Spokesperson
Limu Emu and Doug.
- [19:02]
Marshall Poe
Here we have the Limu emu in its natural habitat, helping people customize their.
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Liberty Mutual Spokesperson
Car insurance and see save hundreds with Liberty Mutual.
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Marshall Poe
Fascinating. It's accompanied by his natural ally, Doug.
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Dr. Calvin Schermerhorn
Limu is that guy with the binoculars watching us. Cut the camera.
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Liberty Mutual Spokesperson
They see us. Only pay for what you need@liberty mutual.com Savings Fairy Unwritten by Liberty Mutual Insurance Company and affiliates excludes Massachusetts.
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Dr. Zachary Williams
It's a fascinating story. And your coverage of it and use of source material and weaving of the narrative is extraordinary. And the questions that it elicits and how it, you know, in particular contextual time, but also how it's enduring and it's covered over a long arc and period and shows this sort of evolution and this sort of, you know, this interesting integration of narratives and social forces and factors is interesting. And one of the other questions I want to ask is your book frames wealth loss as a cycle of plunder. Usually when we talk about plunder, we're talking about earlier eras, you know, on the maritime seas and what happens, you know, with regard to, you know, different, you know, you know, groups, you know, you know, confiscating or getting wealth from others. But, you know, this, this, this idea of plunder adapts across time. As you're talking about, what was the most striking thing that you found about this continuity that you, that you come across. Came across in your research and your work?
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Dr. Calvin Schermerhorn
Yeah, the most striking thing that I found was that you'd think that when the federal government and when the big forces that expanded American wealth in the 20th century did that they wouldn't spend so much time trying to keep African Americans from that wealth. And then as the economy transformed and you have people who are advocating a free market, why are those people who are advocating the remarketized capitalism also pushing back against civil rights, also pushing back against opportunity. And this idea of plunder, while you think about it like Frederick Douglass experienced it as personal social violence, right? He saw his family members sold, whipped, beaten, abused, sexually Violated, Right. You think, okay, that's plunder. And that's kind of the sleight of hand that we, that we see in historical narratives. We say, well, that's over. That ended, okay? And so therefore, you know, the social violence ended, the economic theft of slavery ended. Now we should, after 160 years or so of emancipation, have seen the end of that. But what happens is that plunder transforms and goes quiet. And one of the points that the book tries to make is that when you think about family wealth or household wealth, the difference between an armed overseer in a field and the clacking of typewriters in a government office is very different. Right? It seems categorically different. But what's the end result of that? And so when we see the denials of loans, when we see the denials of opportunities, when we see the ostensible, you know, uplift disappear, then we, we can still call that plunder. If I rob you and I beat you down and I take your. Your wallet or I take the deed to your house and somehow get away with that, okay, that's plunder. But what if I. What if I rob you of a few cents at a time every day? What if I rob you of a few dollars at a time, you know, over the. In a pedestrian way? That's still theft, right? And so the book talks about the Prater family and Rochelle Sanders Prater, who very generously granted me several interviews to tell her story of growing up in Iberville Parish. And please correct me if I pronounced it wrong. Right. Just south of where you are in Baton Rouge, and growing up in this environment where she actually passed the houses of former slave traders on the way to school. Didn't really know the history of that, but her family was very keen on social and economic uplift. They were descended from Marylanders, enslaved Marylanders whom Georgetown College sold in 1838, packed aboard a ship and were taken to the Sugar bowl of Louisiana. She didn't know about that connection until it became public in 2014, but she told me about growing up in Iberville Parish and how her sister went to Southern University, earned a chemistry degree, decided she wanted to stay close to home. So she's going up and down the chemical corridor trying to get interviews with some of these Fortune 500, you know, these big companies. And because she's a black woman, even though she has a first rate degree from Southern Methodist or, sorry, South. Southern Methods, Southern University, big difference. They're laughing at her. And so she eventually got a job with GE General Electric in Ohio by way of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. She was the first black woman to graduate there and had a long and successful career and settled outside of Cincinnati. So that was her sister and Rochelle Sanders Prater. She went to lsu. She, she said she failed because she couldn't keep up with a culture of cheating. She had to work extra hard. Being a black woman in that environment and not being a traditional student. She ended up at Southern. She got her engineering degree and then got a job with McDonnell Douglas Aerospace out in Los Angeles. And that presented its own problems because here she landed in, in Long Beach, California, at the time, in the 1980s, the epicenter of the aerospace industry, all kinds of defense contracts. And she was working among hundreds of engineers at their drafting boards right before computing and AI got into the business of designing these airplanes. And she's working on the most advanced cargo jet the Air Force could Hope for, the C17 Globemaster 3. And so. But she's finding resistance. She's finding people looking at her saying, you couldn't possibly know what you're doing as a black woman. And so this, this kind of quiet discrimination coupled with a lower salary that, than her colleagues were earning. And that's what I'm talking about. That, that subtle plunder pushed her to hop companies. And so she went to work on the, the B2 stealth bomber in Antelope Valley for Northrop before it became Northrop Grumman, and tragically suffered an accident that was very hard to recover from. A car accident with a head injury. And this is the other side of it, as we look at, what can we expect in terms of safety nets? What about Social Security? What about second chances? How many second chances have we been the beneficiary of? How many second chances do white people get? Okay, it's a land of second chances. But Mrs. Prater did not get that second chance. She did not get the occupational therapy, the support she needed. And when she did get Social Security disability, it was for the depression caused by the accident and not the accident itself. And so her career as an engineer was finished. She eventually moved to Cincinnati, has a second career helping students, Being somebody who is kind of an educator and a mentor. But it shows that when these processes go quiet, they're no less far reaching. Right? They're no less decapitalizing, if you like. And the book ends with an assessment of the ways that these processes work today. So in credit reporting and in AI and in ways that if you train AI on racist practices, guess what it's going to be Very shrewd about replicating them. And I'm talking about things like credit scoring in applications and, you know, for jobs that also require background checks and credit histories and opportunities to own or rent a home. And Even in the 21st century, when we supposedly are 60 years removed from the leading gains of the civil rights revolution, we see this going backwards and going backwards quickly. So why is it that African American households, regardless of income and education, get steered into subprime loans, get steered into financial penalties? Why is it that black and Latino students, when they go to school, we have all kinds of surface level diversity, equity and inclusion, get them through the door. But many of them find out what Mrs. Prater did, what Rochelle Sanders Prater did, which is that behind the scenes, the institutions still have that culture of pushback, that culture of hardship. And then why is it that black and Latino families have to spend so much more of household income on goods like education now? And I know I'm going on a bit and talking a little bit, but the background for this is that in the middle of the 20th century, the government in many states made college practically free, or the bar was to entry was very low. Middle class salaries typically paid for a mortgage and a house. The public schools served their purpose. But as we get into this era of remarketized capitalism where education is not seen as a public good, but a private benefit that I have to pay for, that a home, that a mortgage consumes more and more of my income, that while salaries on the top end have mushroomed, salaries on the bottom end have stagnated or declined. And more and more of our future expectation of security is wrapped up in portfolios with our 401ks, our 403bs. And we look at how, how that wealth portfolio in society changes, we can see that it reinvents disadvantages. Just when so many black workers were getting into unions and getting those pensions and getting that job security, we de unionize, we industrialize, we shift focus to the financial services. And why is it that African American households lag in 401ks in their portfolios? And so it's these kinds of considerations, we can say, well, that has nothing to do with those armed overseers with those slave ships, but if we can look at the big picture and see the continuities and the reinventions over time, that starts to look a little bit more like plunder than we'd be comfortable with.
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Dr. Zachary Williams
It's, it's interesting when you talk about the line of dispossession and whether it's Individuals, you know, that, you know, that we're speaking of as you're talking about recounting and even families, but also neighborhoods and communities, I mean, because, you know, making reference to Tulsa, Oklahoma and what's happening there and the community, you know, that seeks to build upon self reliance and self help, even though, you know, after generations, after the promises of 40 acres and a mule, that, that, you know, was not granted to families as had been promised, those promises were not necessarily kept. And, and, but it was for, for some, you know, who, you know, oftentimes had, you know, participated in the sort of, you know, you know, subterfuge or undoing of the, you know, the, you know, the union, the republic, you know, former slave owners oftentimes were getting, you know, you know, recompense of sorts, you know, whereas former enslaved people who even fought in loyal, loyal service to the union, you know, did. And even, you know, we get into conversations about pensions and you know, the first, you know, I think the African American woman, I think Mary Bari has talked about that, Francis Barry about, you know, Cali House, but also too, you know, the, the, the, the Social Security act itself built on a foundation of Jane and Jim Crow where, you know, because of that sort of framework, it's going to continue that line of dispossession, you know, whether it's for, for, for farmers or for domestic workers. And even in Tulsa, where the community has built itself up in a sort of self help fashion. But because of these antagonisms, you know, they are basically sort of, you know, as in Wilmington, North Carolina, you know, their, their efforts and their wealth and their safety and security is sort of vanquished and sort of, you know, forgotten. So, so how do we also factor in from the individual to the family to the, to the generational, you know, the efforts that are, you know, that they're against, that are against, you know, a lot of the, the families in the communities. And how do they sort of forge ahead, you know, even in spite of that? And how does that also connect us to again, this current gap, racial wealth gap that is more, more about, you know, this, this dispossession, this plunder, as you're talking about, versus lack of effort, you know, which is oftentimes what is promoted as the sort of the standard, the standard line. But you know, even when people do attend to, you know, the American values of uplift and whatnot, the other, you know, practices of, as you're saying, dispossession but also not keeping promises, you know, even though the Promises are the ideal in American culture to follow, you know, follow your aspirations and dreams and you can achieve, you know, how does all that factor into this, this sort of total, you know, situation where over generations, people are continuing to press and work, but continuing to find themselves behind and, you know, and not able to get ahead? And as you're saying, too, with the other, you know, adaptations, whether it's AI or whatever, if it's built on a foundation that is as problematic as Jane and Jim Crow was, then how is it possible to get ahead? I mean, it's a new reinvention of the same sort of. Sort of foundational barriers. And so. So how is it possible people are able to build wealth, but how can it be possible to build even greater wealth if we are able to structurally, you know, right those wrongs?
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Dr. Calvin Schermerhorn
Great set of questions, Dr. Williams. And this. So if we go back to Tulsa in 1921, there was an implicit promise there, an implicit deal. So when Oklahoma, you know, boomed in the early 20th century, right around its statehood, it was an oil state. There's a lot of wealth flowing through and out of Oklahoma. And Oklahomans said, oh, we're going to do it better. We're going to build segregation from the ground up. And so the Greenwood neighborhood, Black Wall street in Tulsa, the deal was black people over here, white people over here, and the African American business leaders, many of whom were descended from enslaved people who had moved from places like Texas, like. Like Tennessee. And the, The. The. They built the businesses. They built the doctor's offices, the dentist's offices. They. They built the theaters, the hotels, the shopping centers. And Greenwood was wealthy. It wasn't, you know, Wall street, you know, Wall Street, Wall street, wealthy, but it was middle class. There were African American bankers. There were social services. And so the book actually starts on that fateful June morning in 1921, when a misunderstanding resulting from a black teenagers stumbling into an elevator, then being accused of molesting a white girl that was may or may not have been, you know, in that elevator, blew up into a massacre. And so Hartwell Ragsdale, 29 years old, was the owner of the Home Mortuary, sorry, the Home Undertaking Company at 114 North Greenwood Avenue. And as he saw a pillar of smoke outside, pops of gunfire in the neighborhood, he rushed to gather valuables. Now, he was the second generation of black business people. His father had founded the Home Undertaking Company in 1890 to answer a need. There was segregated undertakers. There are still segregated undertakers today. There are still segregated, you know, burial services. So he Fled. He hid out under a train. He got to Wichita, Kansas. He survived with little more than the clothes on his back. The home undertaking company was reduced to ash. The insurance companies blamed black people. Never paid it out. This was $250 million in like 20, $20 that was lost, never recovered. The whole greenwood was leveled afterwards. The since the insurance didn't pay the claim, most people lost their homes, their nest egg, their entire investment. Railroad companies came in and said, hey, we'll give you a pittance for what you, you do own. And, and what we have today is commemorations and very little else. And I'm not even sure that you can teach that in many Oklahoma schools today without running into a buzzsaw of protest. So what happened to Hartwell? Hartwell Ragsdale picked himself back up. He moved to Ardmore, Oklahoma, and opened another home undertaking company in another segregated town. Now, his children, Hartwell Jr. And Lincoln, they had other plans, but Lincoln wanted to fly airplanes. He graduated high school in 1944 in Ardmore. He enrolled in flight school. He was one of the few who made it through the Tuskegee Air School. Air, I guess you call it the air school. He got his wings, his lieutenant's bar. He was commissioned an officer in the United States Army. That's right before the Air Force was branched off from the Army. So he's in the Army Air Corps. He's posted to Luke Airfield right outside of Phoenix, flying the most sophisticated fighters in the United States, the P51 Mustang. But even on base, it's segregating. He's living with a captain from Mississippi and says they don't have a lot of captain's quarters. They had to integrate them. And Ragsdale noticed that this guy is looking at him when he comes out of the shower. And he asked this captain, who by no means was a dull mad, why are you looking at me? And the captain says, well, I come from Mississippi. And back in Mississippi, at church they tell us that all black people actually have tails. And I wanted to see yours. And so this is where we're starting from. Now this is Phoenix in the 1940s. Ragsdale gets out of the Army. He looks around and sees the future of Phoenix. It's going to become a big city. It's not Wickenburg, it's not Gila Bend. This is going to be a big city. And there are black families moving there as part of the great migration. They're moving from Oklahoma, they're moving from Texas, and they're going to need burial services. He Saved up his army pay, he's bought some lots. Phoenix already has segregation. There's a railroad tracks that go along Van Buren Avenue. The north to south, sorry, the east to west avenues are named after presidents. Van Buren is here. This is the black and Latino section. This is the white section to the north. Ragsdale says, okay, I'm familiar with this, I'm from Ardmore. I know how this segregated economy works. So he says, I want to open a mortuary company. He tries to get a loan, but even though he's got the property, he's got the experience. His brother Hartwell Jr. And a cousin come to Phoenix. They're saying, we're ready to open up, but the banks will give him a loan. Okay, there's a problem with this, right? The GI Bill, the Servicemen's Readjustment act of 1944, is supposed to fund this kind of business. Well, after staging a one man protest at a Phoenix bank, he starts walking around. Here's a black man in a business suit kind of on the corner. And he's stopped by a Swiss born immigrant, right, who's living the American dream as an architect. He invites Lincoln Ragsdale up to his office, his air conditioned office in the Herd Building, and says, what's troubling you? And Lincoln tells him the story. He says, I'll tell you what, I'll give you a personal loan of $35,000 if you let my architectural firm design your mortuary. You got 10 years to pay it back. Ragsdale paid him back in five. And they opened what was called the Chapel in the Valley, one of two black owned mortuaries that serve black and Latino customers. And so far we're doing okay. Now Phoenix is also undergoing this huge boom, this post war boom, just like every city across America. And they're building suburbs and they're building suburbs that are sponsored by the Federal Housing Administration and later the va. What do they do? They guarantee the loans on new construction. Now the house has to their single family homes. Why are there so many single family homes and neighborhoods in the United States? Well, it's partly because of this, because the government decided this is what we're going to subsidize. And so the African American builders in the area got together and formed a consortium called the Progressive Building association at the First Institutional Baptist Church, which is down below Van Buren in Phoenix. The Ragsdale. To make a long story short, Eleanor Dickey, one of Ragsdale's friends, cousins or nieces, comes out in the 1940s to take a job at a segregated School, they get married, they go into the mortuary business, and then they branch out into insurance and they branch out into building homes. And so they buy properties all around South Phoenix and way out in the suburbs, which will become Gilbert, Arizona. But there's a problem because they cannot get the funding, they cannot get the federal funding. And so they're paying 8% interest on loans to build these homes when the people above Van Buren are paying 4% and they're bigger homes. And because of the terms of these loans, many of the customers have to put 50% down versus 20% in North Phoenix. And so this is how, this is the process, this is how decapitalization gets reinvented in the post war generation. And the homes are smaller, they're proportionally more expensive, they're way more expensive to finance. The Ragsdales eventually kind of sidestep out of that business because those homes are not appreciating in value the way the homes in North Phoenix are. But they decide they actually want to move to a home in North Phoenix. And here's where it gets complicated. Eleanor Ragsdale is in the real estate business, right? Because there's a need. There's many, many black and Latino families moving in. And so she serves their interest. They settle on A modest house, 1606 West Thomas Road in Phoenix, above Van Buren street, looking out on the beautiful palm forested Encanto Park. Only they can't buy it because the covenants, the neighborhood rules, say no black occupancy. Since the 1920s, Phoenix has told all the black real estate professionals, you cannot integrate neighborhoods. And the development company Palmcroft actually was writing into the deeds, this property shall not be inhabited by any but the Caucasian race for a period of 99 years. He said, oh, you can have live in nannies or servants who are black or Latino, but you cannot rent or sell these houses to anybody but whites. So Mrs. Ragsdale, Eleanor Ragsdale teams up with a Greek born realtor named George Coronaeos. They tour the house, she poses as his wife so that they don't arouse suspicion once they settle on a price. Coronaeus buys the house, hands it over to the Ragsdales on a handshake. Meanwhile, Lincoln Ragsdale, who's the owner of a mortuary, right, who's, who's, who's a business person, right. A community leader has to go around back at night and look over the fence from the alley behind the house to say, okay, yes, I want to move in here. Why would you want to do that? Well, it overlooks the Park. It's got good schools, it's got the space we need. It will appreciate in value the way that South Phoenix will not. So they move in. The Ragsdales move in. They've got several small children by now and, and the neighborhood just explodes. They form a neighborhood improvement committee. This is something that happened all over the United States whenever this happened. And they get, you know, people knocking on doors with petitions saying, hey, we signed this petition. Leave now. We'll buy your house. We'll buy it for more than you paid for it. You don't want to live here. They get the phones ringing off the hook when people are yelling the N word into the, you know, into this. Ms. Ragsdale's got a babe in arms, right? And she's got to hear this. Somebody spray paints the N word in two foot high letters on the front of their house. And Ragsdale, he lets it sit there. He's like, okay, I want people to see this. I want people to see the hate. But he can't even go home in the evenings when the police stop him and ask him, why are you here? Why are you here in this white neighborhood? And he'd say, well, I own that house. So this is the kind of, right, this is the kind of resistance. And this is in the early 1950s. You could say, well, that that era is long past. But they held onto that house. They sold it in the late 1960s and tripled their money in inflation adjusted dollars. And so that kind of says, well, the, the, the, the real estate, the, the wealth advantages of being able to buy into that neighborhood were down then to their, their kids. Meanwhile, they've gone into the insurance business. And the way that they've done this is they hire white agents and they're, they had 40 agents in many other states. And so they actually glimpsed the future. The future is financial services. Meanwhile, what's happening in South Phoenix. By the mid-1960s, by the civil rights revolution, 96% of African Americans in Phoenix are living south of Van Buren. The city decides, well, these are slums. We need to clear the slums or we need to improve them. So they change the zonings around these, what would have been middle class homes. And so industries start moving in. And you don't need to know a lot about real estate to know that if an industrial facility, if a tire place moves in next door, the property values are going to sink. The interstate highways come through Phoenix and all of a sudden, right, they blow right through the areas in which the Ragsdales had bought and Developed property. So those are neighborhoods where the property values, if they're not sinking, they're at least not rising like they are in North Phoenix. And so if you look at a map of Phoenix Today, there's Interstate 10, you know, which goes coast to coast, Lincoln, Jacksonville and Los Angeles. It cuts through several black and Latino neighborhoods. Interstate 17, which goes north to Flagstaff to catch the I40, it's going through black and Latino neighborhoods. And again, you don't need to be a real estate professional to know that if there is a highway on ramp in your yard, your property values aren't going to rise very well. So let's put this all together. You've got redlining, old redlining, new discrimination from the federal government. You've got urban renewal, which puts a lot of industries that are polluting, making noise side by side with these neighborhoods that might have been middle class. And then you cut them all through with interstate highways. And then on top of that, the good jobs are in North Phoenix. So by 1965, you have leaders like the Ragsdales saying, we've got multiple problems. And there are new problems in their recent invention. And one of them is that most Venetians, when they see a black person, it's somebody serving them. It's a busboy, it's a waiter, it's somebody who's maybe driving a city bus or doing the janitor work at city hall because the police, the fire, the municipal authorities, the schools, the schools are now integrated, but they're not hiring black teachers. They're certainly not promoting black principals or black teachers in the. So you can see how this new metropolis, right, that has attracted Motorola and all kinds of tech companies, has now formed a new version of the old problem. And so this is the kind of things that, that the Ragsdale saw happening. And they're looking around saying, all right, where are the other African American capitalists, the business leaders, the people who might also have left Greenwood after the Tulsa massacre? Well, the most kind of prosperous business people are owning car dealerships, fast food restaurants. When asked in the 1990s, Lincoln Ragsdale said, kind of the most prosperous black business people I know are a family who owns several McDonald's franchises. Well, there's a two edged sword, right? So yes, you are planting those businesses, like you say, in the community, right in the neighborhoods. But are they serving nutritious food? Are they providing the kind of jobs with a career ladder? And yes, McDonald's was actually very proactive about attracting black franchisees. And there's been a couple of really good books about this that came out recently. But again, you've got the uplift. You can say, well, here's success and you've got McDonald's, where at in many cities and in many times places of community organizing, hubs of community activity where voter registration drives took place. But you're also serving food that maybe is not the most nutritious. You're, you're providing jobs that don't have a lot of upward mobility. So what do we have? And some of the people, the economists who have studied this will say, well, look at your black owned businesses in 1974, 1984, 1994. They're a tiny, tiny fraction of the worth, have the revenues of conventional mainstream businesses and they tend to be confined to retail, to publishing, including music, and to restaurants and fast food. And so it's not the oil companies, it's not the computer companies, it's not the tech companies. And so when we think about, well, we turn the page and we go from manufacturing to high tech to skilled services. Where, where do the, the sons and daughters of even those successful black capitalists go? So the ragsdales, by the 1980s, you know, black Enterprise magazine is listing their insurance company as one of the top 25 in the nation. Great. Well and good. But that's the exception, right? And so this is how the, this is how that, that decapitalization reproduces over time.
- [51:20]
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- [53:16]
Dr. Zachary Williams
And with that, you know, begin to wind up what lessons from your research best explain the persistence of the racial wealth gap in 2025? And what kinds of policy solutions or measures could realistically address centuries of extracted, plundered wealth? And it's fascinating how you're showing in these different narratives of families and individuals and communities and states, this thread of how this interconnected thread of how wealth in American consumer culture is formed in fashion, but also how individuals are trying to, to build wealth and achieve aspirations, but also how it's being plundered. And it's interesting because it's a broad, comprehensive examination through the lives of people. But how in particular, in our current debates, when we're trying to talk about that, there have been conversations among a lot of different scholars about the subject of reparations. And of course there are a lot of commissions and a lot of different cities and in our states, California and New York to try to address it. But even some of those conversations, like I know Professor William Darity and Kirsten Mullen have done significant work. They also have even critiqued some of the work, even of scholars like Thomas Kramer and others who have talked about the upwards of 14 to 16, $17 trillion that adjusted to inflation, that would be the necessary, you know, mathematical and numerical value that would account for that stole that the lost wealth, stolen wealth or plundered or transferred wealth with regard to, you know, farmers and black farmers and even domestic workers. So what, what measures can be used to address it? Derek Hamilton's talked about baby bonds. So how do we address this and how do you see it playing itself in, in the continuance of the racial wealth gap in 2025 and beyond great.
- [55:21]
Dr. Calvin Schermerhorn
Great set of questions. And I like the reference. We've gone from Cali House to William A. Sandy Darity and Kirsten Mullen, right. Who are saying cash payments would make the difference. And that's true. Right. If the harm is financial, shouldn't the remedy be financial? But there's many ways, as you suggest the discussion among scholars like Darity and Cramer. So yes, there's many paths to this. I have paid a lot of attention in the research for the book to suggestions by Professor Hamilton by New Jersey Senator Cory Booker, who has introduced a slew of legislation. And interestingly, this doesn't even seem to be something that's just on the political left. We have a proposal for Trump bonds, Right. And the idea is to guarantee a bit of wealth to anyone born in the United States. Right. You start the bond at age 0 and it accumulates in wealth and it's a, they're able to use it at age 18. Senator Booker, I believe, introduced a, a very similar bill that, that would be. And, and the baby, the baby bond idea is a good one. So in some cities too, and cities and not states yet, but municipalities have said, well, if you can start, if you can give material assistance, cash payments to young mothers, nutritional benefits to babies is not, is not an expenditure. If you look at it over the long haul, it's an investment in their health, which means they will attain more income, they will have better health, better education, better outcomes and be more productive. But to go back to the big picture, I think what you could do to tackle this issue, and it would take a lot of concerted effort to do so, is to see what are those means, policies, practices that tend to strip black wealth and impede African American income and uplift. And so if it's the things like using a history of racially discriminated discrimination to charge higher interest rates to black borrowers, then get rid of that, cleanse the algorithm that is, that is reproducing that. If it is the fact that most, that a higher proportion of black households rent than buy, why are we giving a huge giveaway in mortgage interest deduction to home buyers without giving a rental deduction to those people who rent? Right. If we're, what, what are the, what are the, what's the system of rewards? What's the, what's the system of, of goods that are going to flowing to middle class people versus people who are struggling because of a history of racial discrimination? If we want to look at things like you, you have to, to satisfy a credit check to get A job and to rent a house. Well, why is it that that only flows in one direction? You can't get a job with good credit by itself, but you can lose the opportunity for a job with a history of poor credit. And if you look deeply into the FICO scores, the Fair Isaac company and its and the competitors, there's a very small slice of that score that is directly dependent on, upon your ability to repay your debts. Most of it has to do with family history, where you came up, how, how were you, was somebody paying the bills for you? And until a certain time, did you get that intergenerational transfer of wealth? And the, the economists like Darity, like Professor Hamilton, who study this, say the intergenerational wealth transfer is a huge deal where you start off on the, on the ladder. I think Raj Chetty and others economists, they're, you know, just, you know, read the literature, they're mostly in agreement about this. If you start off on a lower rung, it's like you're tethered to that lower rung. When you climb, you get pulled back down. If you start off on a high rung and you fall, it's like a rubber band that's pulling you right back up. So what we need to do policy wise is dip it back into the history. Look at those practices and those debts, because we do have the receipts for them that have perpetuated this decapitalization. Pay those debts to the extent that we can, and then remove those processes that are holding specifically black Americans back. You could say, yes, also Latino. Yes, also American Indians. Okay, this is not unique, but as Martin Luther King said, actually there is a specific history there. He said that no other ethnicity has been a slave on American soil. And it's great to talk about bootstrapping your way up, but it's a cruel jest to tell a bootless man to pull himself up by his bootstrap. So we have to be cognizant of that history. And I'm speaking hopefully, but we see the policy avenues strangely closing in some directions and opening in the others. So we're open to baby bonds, but we're not happy about diversity, equity and inclusion anymore. And to those who are, and I know we're running short on time, but I think this is very important because what DEI has done historically, forget the surface level dismissal, that this is just promoting people because of their appearance who don't deserve to be promoted. What it has done at its core, core is to adjust the workplace to workers requests or demands. And it's not just about color, it's not just about ethnicity, but it's been a process of employers say, listening to female employees who say, I would like some flexibility around work or childcare and other responsibilities that happen to fall more heavily on women. And so this is why we have remote work. This is why we have flexible scheduling. This is why Companies that do DEI and do it well tend to be more profitable. McKinsey Company, not traditionally known as a champion of the working wage earner, did a recent study saying that the outcomes for companies who have robust DEI programs is better. Outside of this book, I did a little bit of research on Delta Airlines based in Atlanta and their DEI programs, which they saw a problem in their kind of mid level company apparatus where you had a lot of loyal, experienced, very knowledgeable workers who worked those with their way up from the front line, you know, the baggage, the customer service, but they hit a ceiling that prevented them from going into management because they didn't have the credential. And they tended to be African American, they tended to be women. And so Delta said, how about we promote based on loyalty? This is a DEI program, okay? And knowledge of the company and the culture. And then they start to promote people up who are just as, or more competent and better for the company as the people who just had the credential by virtue of whatever good fortune or growing up in North Phoenix, if you like, that redounded to the benefit of the company. And so if you treat DEI as just a whipping post or just something to be dismissed out of hand and you're not looking for the value in it, I think you're missing something. I think we're missing something. So those are the leading suggestions.
- [63:12]
Dr. Zachary Williams
Thank you so much, Dr. Schermer Horn, thank you for your work. It's an extraordinary contribution to historical literature, but also it interfaces with a number of other disciplines in a way in which it helps us to understand a broad scope through the eyes and experiences of individual families and communities, but also how it also has a cross sectional application to our entire country and even more broadly globally when you look at the global nature of American capitalism and how the United States becomes more of a global entity and everything that that is done, you know, within the borders of the US actually has sort of, you know, transnational sort of influence, you know, economics, politics, culture, et cetera. So thank you so much. I wanted to ask you what you're working on next. What's, what's, what's next with regard to your research and, and, and, and where. What are you pursuing the next project.
- [64:09]
Dr. Calvin Schermerhorn
That I'm envisioning now? I'm tentatively calling Harriet Tubman's people. How did those people whom she shepherded to freedom, those 70 or so people from Dorchester County, Maryland, and, you know, surrounding counties, how did they fare after emancipation? How did their children fare? So if you're hearing a resonance, right, it's, it's, it's this, this idea of looking down the generations to seeing, to see how, how did their. How did they do?
- [64:40]
Dr. Zachary Williams
Well, hopefully we'll be able to have you back and to speak about that work as you complete it. And again, we want to just thank you so very much for giving up your time to present a work that has significant importance to not only the historical area, but also African, African American studies, American studies in general, and for coming on the New Books Network and sharing your fostering experiences with us today. And so we just want to thank you for that and, and wish you well as you continue to work on future projects. And again, hope that we can have another conversation later on. So thank you so very much.
- [65:22]
Dr. Calvin Schermerhorn
You're welcome. Thank you, Dr. Williams, it's been a pleasure.
- [65:24]
Dr. Zachary Williams
Thank you. Take.