Transcript
You're listening to RadioEd, the University of Denver podcast. I’m your host, Emma Atkinson.
Booker T. Washington once said: “An inch of progress is worth more than a yard of complaint.”
A once enslaved man who became an author and speaker in the post-Reconstruction Jim Crow-era South, Washington famously advocated against protest and agitation tactics meant to advance civil rights. Washington’s position was that Black Americans should concentrate on economic progress, rather than desegregation efforts.
He believed that economic success would advance Black people in American society and protect them from the violence of the Jim Crow era.
However, this wasn’t always—or even often—the case.
In a paper titled, “An Inch of Progress: Black Business and Black Accountants Fighting Jim Crow Violence,” researchers from the University of Denver have set out to set the record straight on how economics and accounting actually hurt or benefited Black Americans at the time.
What we found is that, often, Black economic success led to further racial violence and animus.
That’s Kimberly Jones, a professor of history at the University of Denver’s College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences. Her work centers around the Black diaspora in North America.
As we're doing our research, we're thinking about the way that that line, an inch of progress, and the way that we use it really reveals the shadows in Booker T Washington's assertion that Black progress ought to lead to a more complete relationship between Black people and citizenship. But as we see, as we read, and as we know that doesn't exactly happen.
The research is the brainchild of Tony Holder, an accounting professor at DU’s Daniels College of Business. He says the research initially came about as he set out to write a paper about Black Wall Street with Mayowa Alabi, a Daniels graduate student.
When Holder brought Jones into the fold, he quickly realized the scope of the project was much larger than he’d originally thought.
I looked at our history colleagues and saw Kimberly's background. So reached out to Kimberly and talked to her, and I just remember, in the first conversation that I had with her, I told her that I want to write a paper on Black Wall Street. And she asked which one? Which told me a couple of things: one, I don't know anything about African American history, and two, our research would probably be a lot stronger if we expanded beyond just the one location which we were thinking, which was in Tulsa, Oklahoma. And so from there, the project kind of naturally evolved into a much broader study.
I’m going to back up a little here. We’ve mentioned Black Wall Street, the term for an economic district in Tulsa, Oklahoma that was widely considered one of the most prosperous Black communities in the United States in the early 1920s.
The local economy was so strong, the researchers note, that money would circulate around the community for 19 months before being spent outside of it—normally, this number is closer to just a few weeks.
The Greenwood neighborhood in Tulsa, otherwise known as Black Wall Street—was thriving.
And we can’t tell the story of Black businesses, Black accountants, Black prosperity in this country without telling the story of Black Wall Street.
Despite the success of the district, and how it helped Black businesses, Black accountants and the community at large prosper, its future would be destroyed by jealousy over Black economic success in the form of white supremacist violence.
It all began with a newspaper.
In late May 1921, the “Tulsa Tribune” reported that a Black man named Dick Rowland had attempted to rape a white woman named Sarah Page. For white people in the Greenwood neighborhood in Tulsa, this was an opportunity to enact violence.
In “An Inch of Progress,” the researchers write, “The jealousy over Black economic success that had been simmering in the city became entangled with white supremacy and Jim Crow violence.”
What ensued was two days of racial violence: murder, looting and arson.
White people in Tulsa killed 300 people, injured 800 and destroyed 35 city blocks on Black Wall Street—all because of a racially inflammatory newspaper article.
To make matters worse, grad student Alabi says, the fires destroyed all evidence that white people owed money to the Black accountants and business owners in Tulsa.
Insurance companies refused to pay claims. They called it a riot instead of an attack, which meant that Black owners had no way to rebuild what they had lost. And I think the economy the community never recovered from that disaster. So the loss of the financial documents and generational wealth left a lasting damage on the Black community, which made it very difficult for Black families to recover. So it wasn't just a physical destruction. I think it was an economic warfare that was designed to erase Black prosperity.
The Tulsa Race Massacre is no doubt a tragic and momentous event that has been studied and written about tens of hundreds of times over. But what interested Holder and Jones the most was what initiated the massacre: the “Tulsa Tribune” article. And that led to focusing their research on newspapers and how they contributed to violence towards Black accountants.
When we think about newspapers, they tell us what happened, sort of, right? They tell us what people thought happened, and they tell us what people felt about what happened. And when we're thinking about racism and racial violence – that's the part that we were interested in. Not only what happened in places like Tulsa and Slocum and Atlanta, which we research, but also what people thought happened and how it makes how it meshed with the reality of the event.
What role did Black newspapers play in advocating for economic inclusion?
Since the beginning, I think the first Black newspaper in the United States was 1827, “The Freedmen's Journal.” And not a departure from some of the other newspapers during that time, Black newspapers really made an attempt to be critical and to be investigative with what happened, right, to actually discover the truth of the events as well, particularly because a lot of the events that they're reporting on are really personal and dangerous, in some ways, to Black people. So even from the start, Black newspapers sought to tell the truth of events. And so they countered a lot of the white narrative, the negative white narrative from white newspapers that was happening during the time.
Another deadly event, this time in Slocum in 1910, began with a dispute over a debt, or a note, as Jones calls it.
The incident sparked off in part because of an unpaid note. But the newspaper had different information about who owed the note, and who could claim the note. And so we had to use several different sources to figure out what actually happened.
The newspapers either intentionally or unintentionally misled the reader into thinking that the Black person owed the note, as opposed to the Black person was the person that held the note.
From Tulsa to Slocum, or Atlanta to Detroit, the researchers looked at 10 incidents of racial violence from 1873 to 1943. All were set in motion by simple accounting transactions that were unjustly disputed due to racism.
The team took a unique approach to their research, applying a common economic concept called the fraud triangle to incidents of economically-motivated racial violence.
The fraud triangle basically says that whenever fraud occurs, there's also these three components. So there's pressure, there's a reason why the fraud occurs, and it could be that the person had some sort of financial hardship, right? So they needed money. And then there's opportunity, because you can't commit the fraud if you don't have the opportunity to commit the fraud. And then there's rationalization. In our own minds, we're all the hero, right? None of us are the villains in our minds. And so when we go to sleep at night, we have to be able to justify this fraud. And one of the things that I always say to my class is that it's very easy to get to the rationalization part. And you ask people, you know, how many of us are employed? Most of us are employed. How many of us are earning what we're worth? That's a much smaller group, right? And so the rationalization part is very easy. I'm being underpaid, right? Therefore I'm going to do whatever I have to do.
Pressure, opportunity and rationalization: the fraud triangle in a nutshell. Holder and his colleagues decided to take this framework and apply it to their research, and thus, the racial violence triangle was born.
With the racial violence triangle, we take those three things—pressure, opportunity and rationalization – and we apply it to racial violence instead of financial fraud. So while the fraud triangle explains fraud as a mix of financial struggles, pressure, weak oversight, opportunity and self-justification, rationalization, we use the same factors to break down how racial violence happens
I will say this, we were very surprised that the elements did seem to apply to racial violence, much like I've always been surprised at how well the fraud triangle predicts fraud. This does seem to predict racial violence much the same way.
Jones, on the other hand, says her perspective on the application is a little different.
I was the one who wasn't surprised that such an economic relationship applied so well to Black violence, in part because of this relationship between accounting and slavery. Which, if we think back even toward the transatlantic slave trade since the 15th century, right, Black people, as we say in the work, were always part of accounting and part of the ledger, and accounted for in various ways, even it's just a tally of how many bodies were on a ship, right? So that's really the starting off point, and I think that really gives a different intimate relationship between the work that we're doing and the point we make about that, which I will say other scholars have also made about the relationship between accounting and slavery and the fraud triangle in that part, But even in American chattel slavery, enslaved people were part of financial transactions for collateral arrangements with blanks, regardless of their condition of their body—whether they had a disability, how old they were, children and elders as well – were part of these financial contracts whether or not, that they could actually do productive labor? They were always part of the system of banking and accounting in that way.
And one of the things we try to emphasize in the paper is slavery and pre slavery, it was accounting for Black people. Post slavery, it was more accounting by Black people. So we emphasize the difference between ‘for’ and ‘by’.
Through their research, the team identified three types of violence: physical, cultural and economic.
Yeah, the types of violence that we really located as we were reading from the newspapers about what happened – and as I said, what people felt and thought about and how they interpreted what happened – were physical, economic and cultural. Physical violence are the ones that we typically think about when we think about Tulsa and other race massacres, that people died, right? People were harmed physically. People lost their limbs and they lost their lives. This sense of loss is actually very immediate and personal.
Economic violence is also... I think if you thought deeper about Tulsa, like as we said, then you would think about the ways in which the events destroyed economic possibilities and opportunities for a community and for people individually. Cultural violence is the sort of violence that happens due to racial stereotypes and due to racial animus, where white people, at this time are constructing a narrative that they believe is true about Black people that could lead to these other sorts of violence, but often leads to a different sort of discrimination about who Black people were and what their capabilities are.
For instance, we came across one newspaper article that talked about the suggestion that Black people ought to work harder and not complain about the work, even if they're injured and even if they're paid less in order to be able to even get a minuscule amount of equality. And this came from a different white person who was a politician, I believe. So that's a sort of cultural violence, and the expectation that in order to fully realize who you are in this society, in this community, in this culture, that you have to be diminished in some way.
Cultural violence, the researchers assert, is the most insidious and pervasive form of violence left over from the Jim Crow era—one that still affects Black accountants to this day.
One of the arguments that I make about why we should care about racism in the past is that history has a way of repeating itself when the lessons go unlearned. And I think that if you think about today's political climate without making this a much longer response, you can kind of see why we need to learn from the past.
Our research matters, because it's really important for new accountants, new Black accountants, to really understand what has happened in the past. I think it would help us to kind of like, appreciate more – how far we've come, the progress that we have made. And I think it can also be kind of like a source of strength for a new accountant, because in our research, we kind of like walked to the present and then reviewed some articles about what Black people face currently in the accounting firms and some other industries. And I think going through what we put in our paper can serve as a source of strength. You know, just you can do it. Just keep going and you know, it helps. I think you will help people to appreciate how far and the progress we've made as Black accountants.
I like to say history may not repeat, but it rhymes, right? And what we have to learn the rhythm. That's why I tell my students all the time: we learn the rhythm when we study history. And this is us present in the rhythm of the past, right? Like these beats in time, this racial violence triangle is applicable today. It connects with people because they can see it – because they've experienced moments like this. If you take the shooting of Mike Brown in the the St Louis protests that happened in the aftermath, some of the businesses that were burned down happened because of their economic relationship with the community in which they existed in, right? So by just focusing on, I think, these moments of protest, and only seeing them in part because of the physical violence we missed the complete story, and then we missed the rhythm.
A big thanks to our guests, University of Denver professors Tony Holder and Kimberly Jones and graduate student Mayowa Alabi. More information on their work can be found in the show notes. If you enjoyed this episode, I encourage you to subscribe to the podcast on Apple Music or Spotify—and if you really liked it, leave us a review and rate our work. It really helps us reach a larger audience—and grow the pod.
Jordyn Reiland is my co-host. Joy Hamilton is our managing editor. Madeleine Lebovic is our production assistant and musical genius and James Swearingen arranged our theme. I'm Emma Atkinson, and this is RadioEd.
