When I was growing up, East Texas might as well have been another planet. I grew up in Phoenix. There was me, my dad, my brother Dan, and the Catholic schools where we were often the only black kids. In my mind, Texas was big hats rodeos that showed Dallas, and the only thing that connected me to the state was a chunk of land my family owned there. My dad's land was in a tiny town called Gilmour, near Mount Pleasant, where we have a lot of distant relatives.
We drove through there once, but I don't remember meeting any relatives. I do recall sleeping in the car and arguing with my brother. After Arizona, I moved to California and then France, about as far as you get from Phoenix. Sometimes my dad would call me and talk about the Texas property. How would buy a better life for him and my brother, who has a disability, How there might be oil on the land or some kind of rare timber.
I was never sure how seriously I should take him, but sometimes I'd like to fantasize that this could be my retirement. I also like to brag to my French friends about being a Texan landowner. It sounded kind of cool. Years went by. My dad talked less and less about the land, but he never gave up on it, and one email I got from him, he says, I'm certain of one thing. If that property ever pays off in Texas, we are out of here to someplace other than Mexico.
I have no idea what he meant by Mexico, and I never got a chance to ask. He got cancer, and while sick, a cousin reached out to see whether I could get him to sell some of the land. I tell the cousin how busy I was with kids and work and living abroad, sort of code for I really can't be bothered with this right now. Dad died in early twenty six and for the next four years I completely forgot about Texas. But during the pandemic and after George Floyd was killed, I got to thinking about family.
While digging around my closet, I came across a bright red folder called Dad's Stuff. I opened it and I was floored by what I saw. The data shows that the median white family has ten times more wealth than the average black family. One of the drivers of that wealth gap is redlining. When it comes to understanding financial inequality in this country, Economists often point to the absence
of African American generational wealth see the black Page. It's a trend propelled not just by economic forces, but by white racism in local white political and economic power. It's much easier to enter rate a lunch comment than it is to guarantee an annual income, for instance, to get rid of positive Welcome back to the paycheck. I'm Rebecca Greenfield and I'm Jackie Simmons. In our last two seasons, we looked at all the reasons for and efforts to
fix the gender pay gap. This time we're switching gears. We were starting to think about our third season when the pandemic hit. It quickly became clear there was another economic inequality demanding our attention, the racial wealth gap. I got to talking about it with my colleague Jackie. I'd recently moved back to the States after two decades overseas. I came back to a country dealing with its racist past in a way it never had Black Lives Matter
protest politics. All this on top of a pandemic that got me thinking about how my own experience with race was shaped by my family's past, and it took me back to Texas in the land. I started asking questions, which led to more questions, and as I went deeper, I wondered how unique our story was. How did black people build wealth in America? How did they keep or fail to keep it? That's what Jackie and I will
be exploring for the next eight weeks. The US is the richest nation in the world and has been for a long time. All told, American households have about one sixteen trillion dollars in wealth, most of that owned by white people. Black people make up around the population, but have just three point eight percent of the wealth. The US passed civil rights laws meant to remove barriers for black Americans nearly sixty years ago. Some things have changed a lot, but not the wealth gap and real terms.
Here's what that means. When you count up how much the average American household is worth, including stuff like property, investments, savings, and anything else worth a dime minus any liability is like student debt or mortgage. White households have almost seven times more than Black households. There are a lot of reasons for that, mostly America's legacy of slavery and racism, and that shows up in all kinds of ways that
contribute to economic inequality. Black people are in less pay higher taxes, have more student debt than white people, and so on. Over time, this has made it harder for black people to accumulate wealth and pass it on to their children. As much as Americans love the Racks to Richest story, the reality is most people acquire wealth from their parents or their parents parents. By one measure, Americans wealth came from inheritance. It's hard to overstate how important
that is. William Daretty, who also goes by Sandy, is a professor at Duke University, and it's one of the nation's leading scholars on race and economics. If there are certain families that have a greater capacity to provide gifts to the next generation than others, they're also providing that next generation with a greater range of opportunity and a
greater likelihood of having a more economically secure future. For all the reasons we'll talk about this season, white people have had and continue to have huge advantages when it comes to building wealth. Among the five hundred richest people in the world that Bloomberg tracks, there are one hundred fifty five American billionaires, and just one of them, Robert Smith, is black. Yes, having money means you can buy bigger houses and nicer cars, but it's much more than that.
Here's Sandy Daretty again. Wealth can protect you from income losses in emergencies where you might lose a job, where you might be confronted with catastrophic illness. Wealth provides you with a certain kind of personal insurance, and having that safety net it creates different kinds of opportunities and power. The possibility of moving your family into a high amenity neighborhood, the opportunity of trying to ensure that your children receive
a high quality education. It gives you access to the political process. It allows you to leave resources for subsequent generations. The racial wealth gap tells us a lot about the economy as a whole. Who has security and economic mobility, and this is really important. Whose children gets set up for success later on. So that land my family owned in Texas, my dad hoped it would set us up
for success or at least provides some financial security. And when he inherit the lend from his mother, she wanted this aimed for him and her other children it didn't quite work out that way. Anyone dealing with passing down land knows how expensive and messy that process can be and always has been. But historically, white families and black families have faced different challenges. In My family's story typifies some of them. The story begins with Will and Barbara Brotus.
Barbara was born in eighteen seventy six. She's my great great aunt and was married to Will. They were farmers and had nearly eighty acres in Gilmer, Texas, about two hours east of Dallas. The thumb was between the school in their home. That's sunny and like me, she has relatives who were raised by the Brotus and they raised peace cord beings okrah Amish, peace onion, wallomelon camel, of theories, everything they could. People thought of the protest as strict,
god fearing people, but they were also kind. They took an abandoned or orphaned children, including my grandmother Jewel. They cared for at least half a dozen kids over the years. For a time they lived off the crops they raised on those seventy seven acres. Then Will died and Barbara divided the land between children and family friends. She died in nineteen sixty four. I searched high and low trying to uncover exactly how Will and Barbara originally came into
the land. I went through public records, I made phone calls to family members across multiple states. I called county officials. What experts and historians do know is that black farmers were often gifted land from a white landowner or possibly even a former slave master. My family records only date to the time when the Brotess split up their land. Let me let me check. Let me check one of my documents here. Okay, that's my cousin Ples. He has
all of the records. Uh. Jules Simmons two point five two acres, Mildred's Shop three point five acres, Florida, May Phillips two point five acres, Katherine Young two five acres. By the time the Brotus died, the children they raised had moved on and out of Gilmour. They wanted their children to go to college and were professional jobs, which usually took them to bigger cities. And that's exactly what happened. But while our families commitment to the land declined, one
thing did not property taxes. They went up and up, and the land that should have been an asset became a liability. I looked at it. It seemed like a headache. My cousin Noel, who lives in Atlanta, sold the last of his family's personal in two thousand nine. All I heard about the land was distress. My mother didn't concern herself with it for the most part. Other than giving money to help pay all property taxes. There are other reasons not to hold onto the land. LANDA Davis is
another cousin and lives in Dallas. At one point, she considered using the Gilmer Land as a retreat center for her youth mentoring group, so she went to Upshurre County to deal with taxes. But when she got there, she says, a white man overheard her talking about her plans, and he said, I don't want to deter you or any of that, but I don't think you, being black, this will be a good place for you all. And we're like, okay, he said, I have some good black friends, but there's
a lot of white people out around here. This not really wanting X to be in this area. Llana sold most of her parcel in we would never live in Gilmer, or even developed that land in Gilmer. We need to let that go back to my dad's land. Remember when I was digging around my closet over a weekend during lockdown, Well, I had to catch my breath when I found an offer letter from my dad's land from a man I'd never heard of. Turns out Dad agreed to sell his piece of land a long time ago. I had no
idea he sold it or why. The man who bought the land was named Shane Mayn, so I called him up to find out more. Okay, so are you are you from like that vicinity or are you from a different part of Texas. I'm actually from gilmur originally. Shane's white and has spent his entire life in Gilmour. He works as a home inspector, he's a deacon in a church, and he's been buying land in the area since he was seventeen. He eske to meate he's got around sixty
or seventy acres now, including my dad's two point five. Yeah, I remember when we bought that property. We've been kind of like buying pete piece and here and there we were going we were actually gonna be aild a house on it, if we got enough accumulated in there. Uh, but we never have. We've just got trees up there. At the moment. In the files I was searching through, I saw Shane offered my dad about six thousand dollars for the property. That figure felt really low to me.
And then I saw paperwork in that same file cabinet showing the county had to praise the land at almost six times that amount. I asked Shane about that. He didn't agree the land is worth that much. I was told that every acre in ups Your county is valued at twelve thousand, five hundred dollars and no matter what it is, and that's the base pride. It can go up, but it won't go below twelve thousand five night and
every piece of land on that no matter why. Really, I couldn't disagree more because like Yolanda's half an acre, I'd be glad to send you a picture of it. It is a swamp. I mean a swamp. I reached out to the up Sture Appraisal Office for the record an official. They're said, valuations vary and not every property starts at twelve thousand five an acre. I've never been to Gomer, I've never seen the land. The county said it was valued at more than thirty thousand dollars, which
would help explain why the taxes were so high. But when it came time to sell, it was only worth six thousand dollars. That still didn't make sense to me. But when you start to add up the history of how we got the land, the multiple slivers that were parceled out to family owners who were impossible to track down, the inadequate record keeping, the nature of the land itself, and high taxes, you start to get a sense of how black families in the US have a hard time
passing on wealth. Before I hung up, I asked Shane what he planned to do with the land. Everything my son to give them something another flip. And when I get older, Black Americans have been trying to shore up their economic futures for over a hundred fifty years, We're going to spend a lot of time looking at how
those efforts have been boarded time and time again. But there are also places in the US that are seen as havens for black people, places where ambitious young professionals are finding community and upward mobility, and there's one in city that tops that list, Atlanta. I've been a journalist at Bloomberg for twenty four years. I started in Paris as a retail reporter. These days, I manage our bureaus
across the America's, among other things. And just over a year ago, one of our reporters, Jordan Holman, told me she wanted to leave New York City. I pitched to you that I should be going to Atlanta, um, which I remember you were surprised about and said you did not expect that from me. Oh did I say that? Because you figured that I would want to stay in New York and that I was super happy there, So why did you want to go to Atlanta? I was
imagining Atlanta just being super fun, you know. When I would bounce the idea off my friends, like what if I moved to Atlanta? They were like, if I would move to any other city, it would be Atlanta because there's so much entertainment and culture here, lots of good food, and then the element that there's so many black people there who are thriving. I was like, Okay, I can make that work too, I can be part of that. So moved and now you're in Atlanta, I am, and
it's been really eye opening. I think the idea of Atlanta as this black mecca have been so deeply ingrained in me growing up. I had cousins who graduated from more House and Spellman, and when we visit it, we went to the King Center and all of that. So I was really surprised when I read the stats. There are a lot of successful black people in Atlanta, but
the income inequality is also off the charts. The median household income for a black family in Atlanta is about twenty eight thousand dollars, compared to about eighty four thousand dollars for white family living in the city. I was reading the biography of Maynard Jackson, the first African American mayor as you know in Atlanta. He was elected in nineteen seventy three, and in his biography he talks about the need for affordable and worked for its housing in Atlanta.
So it's been fascinating to me that this is still a challenge for us. That's Atlanta's current mayor, Keisha Lance Bottoms, speaking at a Clinton Foundation event in the fall. She's the city sixth black mayor, but she's talking about the first one Maynard Jackson. He was elected in nineteen seventy three when he was just thirty five years old. Atlanta was a center of black political power during the Civil
Rights Movement. Dr Martin Luther King Jr. Grew up here, went to more House, preached from Aberneze or Baptist and by the end of the nineteen sixties you had a highly motivated, engaged black community here and they elected Jackson. I talked to Tiffany Bussey about this. She's the director of the Entrepreneurship Center at more House and she's been
in Atlanta for thirty years. I think we we cannot have this conversation without really giving thanks and looking at the work and building on the shoulders of the work from Maynard Jackson in the first Black man of Atlanta. He used his political power to lay the groundwork for what would become generations of black wealth. And he did it with this very unsexy thing government contracts. The city
was expanding its airport to become an international hub. It was the largest construction project in the South at the time, and everyone wanted a piece. Jackson decided that a full of the contracts we're going to go to minority owned firms. Prior to that, they got in just one percent. By giving folks a chance and stating a certain percentage to let them in, not to lord a bar, not to change the quality of what needs to be done, but just saying we're going to give them an opportunity to
get a piece of this pie. UM, I think really really cropped the door in UM started the whole movement. The idea of giving minority groups preferential treatment for city contracts was new, controversial, and immediately effective. Within five years, about city contracts went to minority on firms in other cities started to implement similar programs, but the set asides or affirmative action was not universally popular. In Atlanta and elsewhere.
They were almost immediately challenged in court, kicking off decades of legal battles that slowed everything down. By the time the airport gets done. Reagan's in the White House. The culture shifts in Atlantis, growing black middle class kids are going to college to become lawyers or doctors, or to
work in consulting or head to Wall Street. And that's great, But what happens in Atlanta, and this is happening everywhere else in the US is that money leaves the poor and working class black neighborhoods and heads to the suburbs or neighborhoods with bigger houses, better schools, nicer supermarkets. Latresa mclaughharn Ryan is another long time Atlanta resident who's watched
some of these trends unfold. She has the Atlanta Wealth Building Initiative, which raises awareness about income inequality in the city. When people do have greater options, or the greater options that began to develop as a result of the policies that were put into place in the in the seventies, um over time, they moved to where those amenities are easier to harness. It's not just about the amenities, it's also about community, who your neighbors are. Before I moved here,
I didn't realize just how clicky Atlanta could be. So where do you go to college? Where do you go to church? Are you in a sorority? On one hand, those kind networks built a lot of social and political capital, but they also leave a lot of people out. Here's Professor Bussy again. I'm afraid that some of what I see happening in Atlanta is exactly that you have the group that is making it, and then they go off into their own little social clubs and repeat what the
majority community has done. And we know that we did not like what they did. Well, we have some of that happening also, and we have to find a way to break that and not repeat the same mistakes that we saw there. There's definitely a lot working for some black folks in Atlanta. For example, the median income for black families in the city grew about from that was faster than for white households, and it was a bigger jump than for black families in New York, Los Angeles
and Chicago. In the last decade, the number of black households in Atlanta making at least two hundred thousand dollars a year is up by a hundred and that rising tide hasn't lifted all boats, at least not enough to put it in in black poverty or the racial wealth
gap in Atlanta. There's a new generation of activists and politicians who are ready to leverage the city's political power to change that, and they're acknowledging that the issues we're seeing today we're never fully dealt with in the past. Here's Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms again. My husband is a corporate corporate executive. I am the mayor of Atlanta. I live in a neighborhood that has not recovered from the
two thousand and eight crisis. I still owe more on my home um than its value, and my schools in my neighborhood right pretty much at the bottom of all of our public schools. We can't address one or the other. We have to address it comprehensively. So, Jordan, does Atlanta feel like a black mecca in the same way it did before you moved? I think Atlanta is definitely still a black mecca, but I am just realizing that there's
a lot of forces working against it. For example, Atlanta has this affordable housing crisis, there's this shrinking black middle class, and it's just just taking a lot of efforts make sure it lives up to its reputation of being a black mecca and making sure that every black person can benefit from some of, you know, the great opportunities that the city affords. Atlanta story is complex and layered and doesn't give us all the answers. What it does tell us about the racial wealth gap in the US is
that even small political decisions can have big impacts. Next week on The Paycheck, we'll be going deep on just that, the political history of the racial welcap and how moments both big and small, led to the inequalities we see today. You needed to break up the plantations and distribute the land for two reasons. This was the only way that African Americans would avoid being economically dependent on their former owners. They wouldn't really then be free. They did not know
accidentally leave out people of certain races. It did so explicitly um methodically. Where the civil rights movement didn't succeed was in any significant way addressing uh economic inequality between blacks and whites in the United States. Thanks for listening to The Paycheck. If you like the show, please rate, review, and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. This episode was
hosted by Me Rebecca Greenfield and me Jackie Simmons. This episode was edited by Janet Paskin and reported with the help of Jordan Holman, Brett Polly, Maria, Eloisa Capuro, and Katarina Surviva. Our producers are Lindsay Cratowell, Magnus Hendrickson, and Ethan Brooks. Our original music is by Leo Sedgrin. Francesco Levi is Bloomberg's head of podcasts. We'll see you next time.