I recorded this episode in New Orleans, a city whose story runs through Haiti, France and the Louisiana Purchase, which felt like the right setting. The assignment I gave myself was ambitious: four hundred years of Black economic history, from 1619 to now, told in about forty minutes, with a plan for the road ahead.

We begin with a truth that too many people were never taught. Enslaved Africans were brought to this country for their genius with the land, and their labor became America’s first great economic engine. From there I trace a line of broken promises, from land granted to freedmen and then taken back, to a Homestead Act that opened the West to nearly everyone but us, to redlining drawn by our own federal government. Seen together, those bricks form a wall, and they make clear that the old story about Black Americans being lazy or unintelligent was never true.

This is a power lesson more than a history lesson. We study the past so we can heal, and we heal so we can deal. That is why the episode closes with the Business Plan for Black America that I presented in Memphis on the 57th anniversary of Dr. King’s assassination, a plan built on moves that need no vote from Congress: raising credit scores, owning homes, acquiring existing businesses and getting ahead on artificial intelligence.

I don’t want you to get mad. I want you to get even, through ownership. The economic arc of this country was bent against us for a very long time, and I believe we can bend it back toward us, and with us. Share this one with someone who needs to hear where we have been and where we can go.

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Prefer to watch? The full episode is on YouTube.