Reese

“Some Black Americans who were accused of crimes during the Jim Crow era were thrown into work camps while in prison. There they labored decades after slavery had been abolished. People in convict work camps in Atlanta are known to have helped construct buildings that still exist today, like the federal penitentiary and homes in the upscale neighborhood Inman Park. That legacy in Atlanta is tied to a former mayor from the 1880s, James W. English. He owned the Chattahoochee Brick factory, among other businesses, and according to a book by the journalist Douglas Blackmon, English’s companies managed 1,206 of Georgia’s 2,881 convict laborers, who made bricks, among other manual jobs. English’s “great personal wealth was inextricably linked to the enslavement of thousands of men” decades after slavery had been outlawed, Blackmon wrote. In addition to the convict-staffed brick factory, English owned a bank that merged into Wachovia, which is now part of Wells Fargo. From these businesses, his descendants had money and opportunities to build more wealth: a great-grandson, James D. Robinson III, went on to serve for twenty years as the chief executive of American Express, and then he had wealth and connections to help his son, James IV, found a venture capital firm in 1994. That firm, RRE Ventures, became one of the most successful and lucrative venture capital firms in the world. Robinson III referred our question about the era of convict leasing to a relative by marriage, who told us, “It was a black mark, and history is messy.”
― Louise Story, Fifteen Cents on the Dollar: How Americans Made the Black-White Wealth Gap – From Tulsa's Black Wall Street to Greenwood Banking and Racial Justice

“I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops,” reflected the late writer Stephen Jay Gould. A deepening class divide makes social mobility all but impossible. The result is a de facto caste system. This is not only morally wrong but also tremendously wasteful. Denying access to opportunity for large segments of the population means throwing away vast reserves of talent and brainpower. It’s also been shown to dampen economic growth.”
― Jessica Bruder, Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century

“I think about the parable of the little girl and the starfish told to me by a grandparent, though I can’t remember which. A young girl walks along a beach on which thousands of starfish have washed up during a terrible storm. She begins picking up the starfish, one by one, and throwing them back into the sea. An old man walks down to the beach and asks the young girl, “Why are you doing this? Look at how many starfish there are. You cannot possibly begin to make a difference.” The girl pays the man no mind and picks up another starfish and throws it back into the waves. Then she says to the old man, “It made a difference to that one.”
― Isaac Fitzgerald, Dirtbag, Massachusetts: A Confessional

“Brook’s mother, Taneeta Bacon, spoke frankly to us. “When I left Georgia in 1989, I left looking for something else. But Georgia is everywhere. The same problems are everywhere. There is no promised land.” With that, she walked off. She had framed the march: it was a march about a death, and it was a walk about all that had been taken from Black Americans.”
― Louise Story, Fifteen Cents on the Dollar: How Americans Made the Black-White Wealth Gap – From Tulsa's Black Wall Street to Greenwood Banking and Racial Justice