The Unrelenting Cost of Slavery

The Pay Check

Bloomberg

Society & Culture, Business, Investing

4.4 • 630 Ratings

🗓️ 18 March 2021

⏱️ 27 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This week, we look at the 400 years of U.S. history that help explain today's racial wealth gap. Bloomberg economics reporter Catarina Saraiva takes co-hosts Jackie Simmons and Rebecca Greenfield from slavery to the modern era to show big economic losses to Black people in addition to moments that led to big wealth gains for White people.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	This is an IHeart podcast.
0:04.2	A warming planet, complex geopolitics and fierce competition means business operations are under more scrutiny than ever before.
0:13.0	Returning to Singapore this July, the Bloomberg Sustainable Business Summit is uniting leaders and investors
0:19.0	to explore how sustainability efforts can bolster resilience
0:23.0	and mitigate risk. Learn more at Bloomberg.com slash sbsd-singapore. That's Bloomberg
0:29.7	live.com slash sbs dash Singapore.
0:45.3	When you start looking into the racial wealth gap, there's a moment in U.S. history towards the end of slavery that's inescapable.
0:57.0	It's 1865 during the final months of the Civil War, and Union General William Takumseh Sherman and his army had just marched across Georgia to capture Savannah. And he issues a field order that sets aside land in South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida for freed slaves that they would own and live and work on.
1:06.0	This is known as 40 acres and a mule.
1:09.0	It's often talked about as something that could have changed
1:12.0	the trajectory of the racial wealth gap today, if it ever actually happened. After President
1:18.3	Abraham Lincoln was assassinated, his successor, Andrew Johnson, famously rescinded the offer.
1:24.6	He lacked all of Lincoln's capacity for greatness. He was deeply, deeply racist. He couldn't
1:31.0	have cared less about the fate of the former slaves. And he restored white supremacy as quickly as he
1:38.4	could. That's Eric Foner. He's a professor emeritus of history at Columbia University in New York and has written several books on Civil War era history.
1:48.5	He says this moment was a huge missed opportunity for building black wealth.
1:53.3	By some estimates, that land would have been worth as much as $3.1 trillion today.
1:59.2	But it wasn't the end of the conversation about giving an economic future to former slaves.
2:04.9	During Reconstruction after the Civil War, former slaves and some white allies insisted that genuine freedom required some kind of economic base.
2:20.1	And that in an agricultural society, that meant owning land. In 1866, a congressman named Thaddeus Stevens proposed an amendment to a bill
2:26.9	that would have confiscated all the land from plantation owners, split it up, and given it to
2:32.1	former slaves, and the people who fought for their freedom.
	...

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