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  • [narrator] Just over 150 years ago, this was money

  • for almost half of America.

  • On multiple bills were people picking cotton.

  • Enslaved people.

  • These slaves didn't just represent wealth in America.

  • They were wealth.

  • By 1863, they were worth over $3 billion.

  • Since then, America has slowly, painfully, transformed as a country,

  • breaking down racial barrier...

  • after racial barrier.

  • [Martin Luther King Jr.] I am very optimistic about the future.

  • Frankly, I have seen certain changes in the United States that surprise me.

  • So on the basis of this,

  • I think we may be able to get a Negro president in less than 40 years.

  • I would think in 25 years or less.

  • [narrator] Wealth is different.

  • Wealth is where past injustices breed present suffering.

  • I think the racial wealth gap speaks to the fact

  • that we still have a long way to go

  • to achieve ideals of equality in this country.

  • The racial wealth gap is a measure

  • of the white family and the African-American family

  • that's right smack-dab in the middle, the median.

  • [narrator] The median white household's wealth:

  • their savings, assets, minus their debts,

  • is $171,000.

  • The median black household's is $17,600.

  • And that gap is still growing...

  • and growing.

  • Why?

  • [Martin Luther King Jr.] We hold these truths to be self-evident...

  • We have the right to go to any school in America, but we can't pay the tuition.

  • I wake up every morning in a house that was built by slaves.

  • The American dream need not forever be deferred.

  • [Martin Luther King Jr.] ...that all men are created equal.

  • [Malcom X] If they can't have their equal share in the house,

  • they'll burn it down.

  • I picked the cotton... and I built the railroads

  • under someone else's whip...

  • for nothing.

  • For nothing.

  • [narrator] In January, 1865,

  • the Civil War was ending.

  • Union general William Sherman and Secretary of War Edwin Stanton

  • gathered a group of 20 black leaders

  • and asked them what the black community needed

  • to build lives in freedom.

  • Reverend Garrison Frazier, the leader of the group,

  • answered simply.

  • "The way we can best take care of ourselves

  • is to have land."

  • Four days after the meeting,

  • Sherman issued Special Field Order No. 15.

  • It set aside hundreds of thousands of acres of land,

  • saying, "Each family shall have a plot

  • of not more than 40 acres of tillable ground."

  • The day before his second inauguration,

  • Lincoln signed a bill that made the plan official.

  • America was almost a very different country.

  • [upbeat music playing]

  • But it didn't turn out that way.

  • Weeks later, Lincoln was dead.

  • His successor, Andrew Johnson, quickly reversed course.

  • Immediately once we say, "Okay, equal rights"

  • then you have a white backlash that says, "What about our rights?"

  • [narrator] By the end of that year,

  • thousands of freed slaves who had received land were evicted.

  • In just a year after slavery,

  • President Johnson complained about discrimination...

  • against whites.

  • Quote: "In favor of the negro."

  • But slaves had been creating wealth for their owners for 246 years.

  • That wealth, whites got to keep.

  • And there's an amazing thing about wealth that people who have it know well:

  • it grows,

  • across generations. Just ask Jay-Z.

  • [Jay-Z] ♪ I bought some artwork for one million

  • Two years later that shit worth two million

  • Few years later, that shit worth eight million ♪

  • "I can't wait to give this shit to my children."

  • One thing it says is that wealth begets wealth.

  • Turn one million into eight,

  • raise your hand if you wanna take that deal.

  • [narrator] It doesn't take a risky, Picasso-sized bet

  • to see wealth grow dramatically.

  • It just takes time.

  • If you live in a stable country and can invest long-term,

  • values generally go up.

  • That's why you need to know about compounding interest.

  • Imagine you took $100 and invested it in 1863.

  • The average annual inflation-adjusted return

  • in the US stock market has been around 7%.

  • The next year, it's worth a bit more...

  • and a bit more, and a bit more.

  • Today, that $100 would be worth more than $3.5 million.

  • To this day, African-Americans make a lot less money than whites.

  • They're far more likely to be unemployed,

  • and studies show employers still discriminate.

  • But even if we managed to close those gaps right now,

  • centuries of inequality have already compounded,

  • most powerfully through land and housing.

  • Usually, in this century, any wealth that's captured is through property.

  • [narrator] For the American middle class,

  • home equity accounts for around two-thirds of wealth.

  • So if you're a white American,

  • you're likely to have parents or grandparents with a story like this.

  • [woman] My parents bought a house

  • probably now 50 years ago, paid $14,000 for it then,

  • and it is worth now probably about $600,000 to $700,000.

  • [Cory Booker] Most people don't understand the power of housing,

  • of where you live,

  • of what opportunities exist in that community.

  • [narrator] The government played a huge role in making that happen.

  • During the Great Depression,

  • almost half of all city homeowners were in default.

  • [male announcer] The men are sitting in the parks all day long,

  • out of work, muttering to themselves.

  • [narrator] Franklin Delano Roosevelt took action with the New Deal.

  • ...by providing for the easing of the burden of debt.

  • So the New Deal unleashes mortgage credit to the population.

  • [narrator] The American dream and owning a home became synonymous.

  • But the new Federal Housing Administration

  • wouldn't insure mortgages in areas it decided were too risky.

  • And the way that risk is calculated is by race.

  • A black family moving in was seen as a threat to housing prices.

  • [interviewer] Do you think a Negro family moving here

  • will affect the community as a whole?

  • I think that the property values will immediately go down

  • if they're allowed to move in here in any number.

  • [narrator] So when the FHA drew maps of where they wouldn't insure loans,

  • the neighborhoods with more black families were colored in red.

  • [Cory Booker] Redlining is not a figurative metaphor.

  • You would literally see maps drawn

  • where entire neighborhoods were redlined off.

  • [narrator] The effects of racism became a justification for more racism.

  • [man] If two-thirds of America's middle-class wealth

  • is in the form of home ownership,

  • that opportunity to own a home has now just been excluded.

  • [narrator] Federally enforced segregation affected every part of life:

  • the jobs you could access, where your children went to school,

  • how safe they were,

  • and whether your home increased in value.

  • [all] ♪ Keep your eyes on the prize... ♪

  • [narrator] It wasn't until 1968 that housing discrimination was outlawed.

  • [Lyndon B. Johnson] Fair housing for all human beings

  • is now a part of the American way of life.

  • [narrator] But that didn't mean housing discrimination ended.

  • Consider what it took

  • for Cory Booker's family to get their house in 1969.

  • My parents began looking for homes, but finding just odd things happening,

  • where real estate agents, if they saw them beforehand,

  • they would only show them homes in African-American communities.

  • If it was a house in a white neighborhood,

  • my parents would be told, "This house is already sold."

  • [narrator] Booker's parents set up a sting operation

  • with a civil rights group.

  • The next time they were turned away,

  • a white couple arrived and made an offer on their behalf.

  • [Cory Booker] The bid was accepted, and on the day of the closing,

  • the white couple did not show up. My father did, and the lawyer,

  • and the real estate agent was so angry,

  • stands up, and punches my dad's lawyer.

  • Literally they're fighting, scrambling,

  • and there was a dog in the corner, and he sicced the dog on my father.

  • So my father's now trying to fight off a big dog, a window was smashed,

  • but eventually things settled, and the real estate agent was desperate,

  • and started begging my father: "You don't wanna move here,

  • your people are not here."

  • He was so afraid that one black family would move in,

  • and somehow it would destroy his business and drive down real estate rates.

  • [narrator] Cory Booker and his parents ended up getting that house

  • and that house helped build his future.

  • It built wealth incredibly.

  • My father rolled into another house in the same town,

  • an even bigger house, going from poverty

  • to being very comfortably in the middle class

  • in the United States of America, and really thriving.

  • [narrator] That wasn't the typical story.

  • 100 years of discrimination since slavery

  • left a huge home ownership gap.

  • By the '90s, banks and politicians realized what that meant...

  • an opportunity.

  • Discrimination is patently immoral,

  • but it is now increasingly being seen as unprofitable.

  • [narrator] In the '90s, the government made a push

  • to open up the mortgage market.

  • ...to help families who have historically been excluded from home ownership.

  • [narrator] Black home ownership started ticking up.

  • It looked like the wealth gap might start closing at long last.

  • So you've got people who are hungry for these loans,

  • but what they want is the regular loans that everyone else got

  • from 1934 until 1980.

  • [narrator] Instead, African-Americans were twice as likely as white Americans

  • to get subprime loans,

  • a loan that starts out cheap, and gets much more expensive.

  • for borrowers with lower credit.

  • But one in five black borrowers with good credit

  • still ended up with a subprime loan.

  • I was a loan officer at Wells Fargo in their subprime division.

  • [narrator] So Beth heard the conference calls

  • where Wells Fargo planned to target black churches.

  • [Jacobson] They were termed "wealth building seminars"

  • and that was about purchasing homes.

  • The minister of these churches thought this was a great idea,

  • something to help the parishioners in the community.

  • [narrator] The bank would give the church a donation

  • for each parishioner who ended up getting a mortgage.

  • [Jacobson] So the people in the congregation didn't realize

  • the loan officer they were talking to

  • was only going to sell them a subprime loan,

  • even if they had 800 credit scores.

  • [man Four and a half, six.

  • [female reporter] Stock market breakdown.

  • The worst financial crisis since World War II.

  • ...fueled by mortgage lending that wasn't sound or responsible.

  • [female reporter] ...led by borrowers of high-risk subprime loans.

  • Black communities lost 53% of their wealth.

  • It's hurtful to see a lot of those folks

  • who were at the highest levels of the world of finance

  • who made fabulously irresponsible decisions,

  • that those people have been made whole, those institutions have been made whole,

  • but for communities like mine that are still struggling,

  • that there wasn't some kind of vision or plan

  • to try to help those folks get back on their feet.

  • [narrator] Many of the biggest mortgage lenders in the country

  • settled discrimination lawsuits.

  • Although it denied targeting black borrowers,

  • Wells Fargo agreed to pay $175 million.

  • Unlike in FDR's New Deal,

  • the government's $440 billion program to address the housing crisis

  • mostly didn't go to home owners.

  • The assistance, and a single viral clip, triggered a backlash.

  • How many of you people want to pay for your neighbor's mortgage

  • that has an extra bathroom and can't pay their bills,

  • raise their hand.

  • -[crowd boos] -How about we all...

  • -President Obama, are you listening? -You wanna...

  • We're thinking of having a Chicago Tea Party in July.

  • All you capitalists that want to show up to Lake Michigan,

  • I'm gonna start organizing.

  • [crowd chanting] USA! USA! USA!

  • If we were to go to an equity scenario where whites and blacks

  • had the same amount of educational achievement,

  • it would lower the racial wealth gap somewhat minimally.

  • [narrator] And maybe not even that much.

  • [Thomas Shapiro] The Fed Reserve Bank of St. Louis

  • did a study that came up with a finding that white college graduates,

  • over a couple of decades,

  • their wealth increased dramatically, as one might expect.

  • Black college graduates, over the same period of time,

  • their wealth actually decreased.

  • [narrator] The reason isn't that graduates made

  • very different amounts of money.

  • It was how they spent it.

  • [Thomas Shaprio] It's much more likely to be the case

  • that an African-American college graduate

  • is the most successful in their family network...

  • and therefore relatives ask them for help, and they give it.

  • That doesn't mean that white college graduates

  • are less charitable or less giving, or anything like that.

  • It just means that they're like others in their network.

  • [narrator] African-Americans were wealth for 246 years.

  • For a hundred more years,

  • and discrimination continues today.

  • The wealth gap has grown so large over so many years,

  • it would take something truly radical to close it.

  • How do you close this gap, this huge gap in wealth,

  • -between whites and blacks? -You don't.

  • Reparations.

  • How much are we talking here?

  • We don't actually know, but I will take a check on behalf of myself.

  • [Anderson Cooper] Is anyone on this stage for reparations

  • for slavery for African Americans? Are you?

  • I am. The Bible says, "We shall be and must be repairers of the breech"

  • and a breech has occurred and we have to acknowledge that.

  • [Cory Booker] This does have a generational cost to it.

  • We can't just hope that we are going to thrive as a nation

  • when there are still so many wounds that have not been addressed.

  • This is something that started with slavery,

  • but it's never diminished over time, and that's because government policy

  • keeps perpetuating the circumstances for the wealth gap.

  • It's the Billie Holiday song, right?

  • "Them that's got shall have, them that's not shall lose."

  • It is truly self-perpetuating.

  • [Cory Booker] "Whenever this issue of compensatory or preferential treatment

  • for the Negro is raised,

  • some of our friends recoil in horror.

  • The Negro should be granted equality, they agree,

  • but should ask for nothing more.

  • On the surface, this appears reasonable

  • but it is not realistic,

  • For it is obvious that if a man enters the starting line of a race

  • 300 years after another man,

  • the first would have to perform some incredible feat

  • in order to catch up to his fellow runner."

  • God bless the child ♪

  • Who's got its own ♪

  • Who's got his own ♪

[narrator] Just over 150 years ago, this was money

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