"Take homeownership, which has long been the primary means by which Americans of modest and middle-class income are able to build generational wealth. After the broken promise of “40 acres and a mule” to newly freed slaves, virtually nothing was done to endow black Americans with a share of the wealth generated by centuries of slave labour – the same labour that, directly or indirectly, helped to build most of the wealth enjoyed by white Americans.
|  | The Truth Behind '40 Acres and a Mule' | African American History Blog |...This revolutionary idea became a failed promise to freed slaves after the Civil War. |
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So black Americans started off generations behind, only to encounter the redlining and racially restrictive housing covenants of the early-to-middle 20th century, which prevented the sale of many homes to black Americans, and isolated them together in communities that lost value as white residents fled to the suburbs."
 | NPR Choice page |
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| | Racial Restrictive Covenants - Seattle Civil Rights and La... |
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| | Interactive Redlining Map Zooms In On America's History Of DiscriminationIn the early 20th century, the federal government categorized neighborhoods, based largely on race, to determine... |
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| | Racial Restrictive Covenants - Seattle Civil Rights and La... |
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|  | Median wealth of black Americans 'will fall to zero by 2053', warns new ...Jamiles Lartey Study predicts huge and growing gulf between white US households and everyone else could be disastrous for futur... |
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Cornell Creates a Database of Fugitive Slave Ads, Telling the Story of Those Who Resisted Slavery in 18th & 19th Century America
| | Cornell Creates a Database of Fugitive Slave Ads, Telling the Story of T...While the value of slaves in the U.S. from the colonial period to the Civil War rose and fell like other market ... |
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Why Do Few People Know the History of Northern Slavery?
"I, for one, must admit that despite have grown up in New York—the colony and state with over 20,000 enslaved people (12% of its population) on the eve of the American Revolution—I had virtually no awareness of slavery’s existence in New York or in any of the other Northern colonies and early states. In high school and college, although I had taken a number of American History courses, I never learned anything about it. Clearly, its existence clashed with the widespread popular belief that slavery was exclusively a “southern problem.” As I learned, my case was far from unique. Few Northerners had any awareness of slavery’s earlier existence, and even when they did, what they knew was often very minimal.
In fact, Northern slavery was significant. It lasted from 1626 until 1865—246 years— and involved tens of thousands of people. Merchants from Rhode Island, New York and Boston were the largest North American slave traders in the colonies and early states. The wealth they earned produced the country’s early elite and funded the region’s first industries and universities.
Explaining how something that significant virtually disappeared from the region’s collective memory was at first challenging."
| | Why Do Few People Know the History of Northern Slavery?<p style="margin-left:0in; margin-right:0in; text-align:start">How and why was the enslavement of tens of thousa... |
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