In this magnificent world we inhabit, the Black man is reminiscent of that child with profound autism, whose mother grows uneasy whenever he throws a tantrum in public. To shield herself from humiliation, she might sequester him in a group home, out of sight and out of mind. Little consideration is given to the possibility that her poor choices during pregnancy may have contributed to his condition. Yet this is not a tale of mothers or of autism. It is neither a lamentation for justice nor a plea for reparations. It is, rather, a story we must tell.
In the early 20th century, in the segregated heart of Tulsa, Oklahoma, there thrived a community that defied every stereotype of incapacity. It was called Greenwood, though history immortalizes it as Black Wall Street. At a time when Jim Crow laws choked every pathway to advancement for freed African Slaves, Greenwood soared. It was an oasis of ambition, dignity, and enterprise.
The district boasted banks, hotels, theaters, law offices, and busy stores owned and operated by African Americans who refused to be defined by oppression. It was said that a dollar circulated within the community thirty-six times before leaving, a level of economic self-sufficiency that seems like a fairy tale today.
Then, in 1921, that success became its undoing. White Mobs, backed by local authorities, descended upon Greenwood in a wave of destruction now known as the Tulsa Race Massacre. Within two days, they razed the district to ashes. Airplanes dropped incendiary bombs on Black businesses and homes. Hundreds perished, thousands were displaced. In the aftermath, no one was prosecuted. Insurance claims were denied. Greenwood wasn’t merely destroyed; it was erased, punished for daring to dream.
That tragedy was not an isolated episode but part of a broader pattern, a deliberate effort to push the narrative that Blacks just can’t do it, that we are not good enough. The same psychology that incinerated Greenwood reverberated across the Atlantic, in Haiti.
When enslaved Africans in the French colony of Saint-Domingue, modern-day Haiti, rose up and crushed Napoleon’s army, they did more than win freedom. They shattered the myth of white supremacy and proved that the oppressed could break their chains. Yet Haiti’s revolution did not remain contained; it ignited a conflagration that spread across Latin America. When Simón Bolívar, the Venezuelan liberator, fled in defeat, Haiti’s President Alexandre Pétion welcomed him, not merely as a guest, but as a comrade in struggle.
Pétion gave him money, weapons, soldiers, ships, and even a printing press to fuel his cause. There was just one condition: wherever Bolívar triumphed, slavery must be abolished. Bolívar agreed and honored this covenant. The indelible mark of Haiti endures on the liberation maps that stretches from Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru to Bolivia.
Yet for this moral courage, Haiti was compelled to endure immense suffering. France, humiliated by its defeat, imposed a ruinous indemnity, equating to billions in today’s currency, as the price of freedom. The United States, apprehensive that Haiti’s triumph might inspire its own enslaved population, diplomatically and economically ostracized the nascent nation.
Starved of investment and shackled by debt, Haiti endured over a century of poverty, exploitation, and foreign intervention, including U.S. occupation. Today, it remains the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. And so the story repeats itself, from Tulsa to Port-au-Prince, from plantations to prisons. The punishment of Black success is an enduring motif.
In contemporary America, statistics reveal that approximately three in four White children reside in two-parent households, compared with two in five Black children. Single-parent households, overwhelmingly led by women, are far more prevalent among Black families. Empirical evidence consistently demonstrates that children raised in stable two-parent homes achieve higher incomes, superior educational outcomes, and diminished risks of poverty or incarceration.