In the Black: An African American History of Wall Street

In a speech by Mary Elizabeth Lease, “Wall Street Owns The Country”, she mentioned that this nation is a nation of inconsistencies. The main things she wanted to state was the nation’s economics and political woes because of the government was ruled based on the monetary value by wall street that cause people to suffer. Furthermore, she said that the welfare of the people was no longer considered by the government as a priority but money was. Most of the actions made by the government did not benefit people anymore. The government asked people to go to work and raise a big crop. So the people did as the government said, but the crops were still not enough because the people were “overpopulated”, according to the government. Therefore, people

Jordan Belfort is the notorious 1990’s stockbroker who saw himself earning fifty million dollars a year operating a penny stock boiler room from his Stratton Oakmont, Inc. brokerage firm. Corrupted by drugs, money, and sex he went from being an innocent twenty – two year old on the fringe of a new life to manipulating the system in his infamous “pump and dump” scheme. As a stock swindler, he would motivate his young brokers through insane presentations to rile them up as they defrauded investors with duplicitous stock sales. Toward the end of this debauchery tale he was convicted for securities fraud and money laundering for which he was sentenced to twenty – two months in prison as well as recompensing two – hundred million in

African Americans have endured many trials and tribulations over the centuries. Our people have suffered from war, violence, and anguish simply because of the color of our skin. Our history has been so blatantly missing from textbooks and the K-12th grade educational atmosphere. Our educational system continues to neglect the history of our African American ancestors and fail to provide them with the educational resources to inform them of our past and allow them to learn about the true origins of our culture. We have made many significant contributions to the world but those have also been highly ignored as well.

African Americans didn’t know that is was a Great Depression. African Americans have always been poor and knew how to survive. By 1932, approximately half of black Americans were unemployed, blacks always felt unemployed and under paid. Whites attempted to keep blacks out of work by not hiring African Americans. They used racial violence, and discrimination tactics to keep an underprivileged population depressed.

Knowledge and understanding is key to success and that’s what African Americans developed over the previous battle with black codes. Blacks saw opportunity in adverse situation, such as overcoming black codes which led to overcoming sharecropping. Through that adverse situation, blacks created a way to go around the sharecropping system by eventually forming the “Colored Farmers National Alliance.” African Americans saw the opportunity to sponsor their own cooperative stores where members could obtain necessary goods and equipment at a reduced price, published newspapers to help educate

Over the course of this semester, I was introduced to many people, ideas, writings, and discussions that sparked my interest and enlightened me on African American history. However, I feel like this was just the beginning of my journey of learning the history of my people, as there is still so much out there to be brought to the surface. Prior to taking this course, I was always ignorant on the topic of African American history and simply made the connection to slavery. Additionally, I was unaware of other black activist, movements, and struggles that I had the chance to witness for the first time in this class. I came to a realization of how deprived of this information I was, because other historic events have been deemed more important. A quote that stuck with me throughout the course that was made by Arthur Schomburg was, “... African history and negro history, are the missing pages of world history”.

Understanding that the poverty of black Americans did not just stay within the home is a big step in understanding urban poverty. Urban poverty reached outside the home, into the parks, schools and playgrounds. With poverties reach being that extensive, there was something other than adversity causing this. Louis Gates wrote an article about this called “Black America and The Class Divide.” (Jr.)

On May 31st and June 1st of 1921 the most large-scale racist riot in America occurred. In the wealthiest black community named Greenwood district, also known as “Black Wall Street”, white residents of Tulsa, Oklahoma took to the streets to murder any black man they laid eyes on and to this day an unclear number of blacks were killed. The town was destroyed by fire with hundreds of prosperous small and large-scale businesses ruined, never to flourish again. The advances that the blacks of Greenwood district made were gone in a matter of a day and what was once the most prosperous town was now burned to the ground leaving hundreds homeless, in depth and scarred for life.

bus anymore or drink from a different water fountain but they are now experiencing a reinvented form of racism. It is an undeniable fact that a black person cannot forget the color of their skin, they are constantly reminded of it. The sight of a black man will prompt women to discretely clutch their purses in the street, or will raise the awareness of a security guard in a mall. Best-selling author Otis Graham explains how he tried to raise his children in a way for them to forget their skin color and blend in with the upper-class society. He narrates that he purposely sent them to good schools and dressed them preppy to shield them from racism but explains that they were still called "N****" (Our Kind of People: Inside America's Black Upper Class,

On May 31-June 1, 1921, a series of actions occurred in Greenwood, a small district in the northern parts of Tulsa, Oklahoma, which are now called the Tulsa race Riots.

medical facilities, theaters, hotels, banks and retail stores. Black Wall Street brought great African Americans from across the world, such as, Booker T. Washington, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington and Madame C.J. Walker; this is Black excellence at its finest. Ultimately, Black Wall Street was burned to the ground by Klux Klan members and was never rebuilt.

Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun encompasses all the ideals of the American Dream through her characters: Walter, who embodies the quest for an opportunity for prosperity, Beneatha who wants the freedom to be herself and embrace her African heritage, and Lena (Mama) who buys a home in a white neighborhood pushing the boundaries of social mobility during that time. The Youngers are in a state of poverty, because of this as suggested by Lloyd Brown “their deprivations expose the gap between the American Dream and the Black American reality” (241). However the Youngers attempt to close this gap, challenging the status quo in an effort to better themselves.

In the wake of the recent financial crisis, many commentators attempted to analyze the roots of the conflict from a political or economic perspective. Anthropologist Karen Ho, a veteran of Wall Street as well as an academic, attempted to understand the reason that Wall Street behaves the way it does in her 2009 anthropological study of American finance entitled Liquidated: An ethnography of Wall Street from a cultural perspective. The central paradox with which Ho begins her book is: " the economy experienced not only record corporate profits and the longest rising stock market ever, but also record downsizings," further concentrating the wealth in America (Ho 2009: 1-2). But how can corporations grow richer as the American public as a whole grows poorer? Corporations no longer view themselves as responsible for taking care of their employees, creating good products, or serving their original mission. Instead, the focus is on generating shareholder wealth (Ho 2009:3). Shareholders, not the larger public, have become the symbolic and real focus of firm strategy. The shareholder "symbolized and 'stood in' for the whole of the corporation and became the sole locus of concern and analysis" during the time Ho conducted her study in the late 1990s and continues to this day (Ho 2009:175)

I have to admit, it is an odd choice but yes, I have decided to break through the ethics out of a completely unethical film. I will be discussing my own thoughts and perspectives revolved around the movie, from reasons and circumstances that leads to an unethical life, to outcomes of it and much more.

There is a sense of complexity today that has led many to believe the individual investor has little chance of competing with professional brokers and investment firms. However, Malkiel states this is a major misconception as he explains in his book “A Random Walk Down Wall Street”. What does a random walk mean? The random walk means in terms of the stock market that, “short term changes in stock prices cannot be predicted”. So how does a rational investor determine which stocks to purchase to maximize returns? Chapter 1 begins by defining and determining the difference in investing and speculating. Investing defined by Malkiel is the method of “purchasing assets to gain profit in the form of reasonably