“The nickname ‘Black Wall Street’ didn’t just mean Black people had become wealthy but that the people were invested in their own and one another’s businesses.”
A strategy from “Black Wall Street” may hold the key to saving struggling Main Street businesses today argues author Douglas Rushkoff. The Greenwood District in Tulsa, Oklahoma, was a thriving Black community during the early 1900s before being razed to the ground by a white mob that killed as many as 300 people on May 31, 1921. Greenwood pioneered circular economics, a vehicle for “locally grounded, mutually supportive, sustainable business networks,” where Black businesses would invest in each other through cooperatives, as Rushkoff writes in GEN. He argues that the principles of circular economics could help local communities support small businesses and their employees who have been hurt financially by the pandemic: “We can all learn from the Black experience right now as we look toward sustaining ourselves during lockdown and remaking our economy without the benefit of a functioning federal government.”
