Follow the Money: How Taxation & Banking has Affected the Racial Wealth Gap

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It is difficult to understand the history of economic inequality in the United States without exploring how the nation’s taxation and banking systems have influenced wealth-building along racial lines. From unequal taxation policies and predatory tax laws to financial corruption, African Americans have historically been on the receiving end of unjust practices supported by federal, state, and local authorities. UVA’s historians Justene Hill Edwards (Savings and Trust: The Rise and Betrayal of the Freedman’s Bank) and Andrew Kahrl (The Black Tax: 150 Years of Theft, Exploitation, and Dispossession in America), in conversation with Claudrena Harold, will discuss their recently published books and consider the intertwined histories of taxation, banking, and the racial wealth gap in America.

Justene Hill Edwards, Associate Professor, Corcoran Department of History, College and Graduate School of Arts & Sciences

Justene Hill Edwards’ research explores the intersection of African American history, American economic history, and the history of American slavery. Specifically, she examines slavery’s influence on the evolution of African American economic life. Her forthcoming book, , chronicles the rise and fall of the Freedman’s Savings and Trust Company. Savings and Trust emphasizes the importance of the Freedman's Bank and its collapse by connecting its failure to modern issues such as the racial wealth gap. Hill Edwards is also working on A Short History of Inequality, which will interrogate the ways in which inequality has pervaded and structured American life. Both books are under contract with W.W. Norton.

Hill Edwards’ first book, Unfree Markets: The Slaves' Economy and the Rise of Capitalism in South Carolina (April 2021 on Columbia University Press, in the Columbia Series in the History of U.S. Capitalism), explores the economic lives of enslaved people, not as property or bonded laborers, but as active participants in their local economies. Unfree Markets provides the fullest account to date of the strategies that enslaved people used to create their own networks of commerce from the colonial period to the Civil War. It confronts one of the most enduring questions in African American history and the history of American capitalism: How beneficial was capitalism to African Americans? Through examining an array of archival records, from slaveholder account books to legislative petitions, Unfree Markets shows that even though enslaved people shaped the increasingly capitalist economy of slavery, economic participation alone could not secure what bonds people wanted most—their freedom. The time and energy that enslaved people invested in their economic enterprises did not bring them out of slavery; instead, it kept them enslaved. Ultimately, Unfree Markets demonstrates that the vestiges of race-based economic inequality are not in the late-nineteenth or twentieth centuries but in the period of legal slavery.

During the 2022-23 academic year, Hill Edwards’ research will be supported by a Carnegie Fellowship, funded through the Carnegie Corporation of New York. During the 2023-26 academic years, Hill Edwards’ research will be supported by a Mellon New Directions Fellowship, funded through the Mellon Foundation.

Hill Edwards was a Consortium Fellow at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and a Quin Morton Teaching Fellow at Princeton University’s Writing Center. Her dissertation, Felonious Transactions: The Legal Culture and Business Practices of Slave Economies in South Carolina, 1787-1860, was a finalist for the C. Vann Woodward Prize from the South Historical Association, a finalist for the SHEAR Dissertation Prize from the Society for Historians on the Early American Republic, and a finalist for the Herman E. Krooss Dissertation Prize from the Business History Conference. Hill Edwards’ scholarship has been supported by the Program in American Studies at Princeton University, the Center for African American Studies at Princeton University, the Program in International and Regional Studies at Princeton University, and the College of Arts & Sciences at the University of Virginia.

Hill Edwards currently serves on the Board of Trustees of the Business History Conference and was a Trustee of the Midland School. She is also on the editorial boards of Enterprise & Society: The International Journal of Business History, The Journal of the Civil War Era, UVA Press.

Andrew Kahrl, Professor of History and African American Studies, Corcoran Department of History, College and Graduate School of Arts & Sciences

Andrew Kahrl’s research focuses on the United States’ social, political, and environmental history of land use, real estate, and racial inequality in the 20th century. He teaches courses on African American history, race, real estate, and U.S. urban history. Kahrl is the author of The Land Was Ours: How Black Beaches Became White Wealth in the Coastal South (UNC Press), which was awarded the 2013 Liberty Legacy Foundation Award from the Organization of American Historians, Free the Beaches: The Story of Ned Coll and the Battle for America's Most Exclusive Shoreline (Yale UP), and The Black Tax: 150 Years of Theft, Exploitation, and Dispossession in America (University of Chicago Press, forthcoming April 2024). He served as the Principal Investigator for the study of the History of African American Outdoor Recreation for the National Park Service.

Author of The Black Tax: 150 Years of Theft, Exploitation, and Dispossession in America
https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/B/bo213447492.html

Claudrena Harold, Professor of African American and African Studies and History, Corcoran Department of History, College and Graduate School of Arts & Sciences

Claudrena N. Harold is Professor of African American and African Studies and History, Corcoran Department of History. In 2007, she published her first book, The Rise and Fall of the Garvey Movement in the Urban South, 1918-1942. In 2013, the University of Virginia Press published The Punitive Turn: New Approaches to Race and Incarceration, a volume Harold coedited with Deborah E. McDowell and Juan Battle. Her second monograph, New Negro Politics in the Jim Crow South, was published by the University of Georgia Press in 2016. In 2018, she and Louis Nelson coedited the volume Charlottesville 2017: The Legacy of Race and Inequity. Her latest book is When Sunday Comes: Gospel Music in the Soul and Hip-Hop Eras (University of Illinois Press, 2020).

As a part of her ongoing work on the history of black student activism at UVA, she has written, produced, and co-directed with Kevin Everson nine short films: Sugarcoated Arsenic, Fastest Man in the State, 70 kg, U. Of Virginia, 1976, How Can We Ever Be Late, Black Bus Stop, Hampton, Pride, and We Demand. These films have screened at the National Gallery of Art, the Whitney Museum, the Berlin International Film Festival, the International Film Festival Rotterdam, the Oberhausen International Short Film Festival, the London Film Festival, the Vienna Shorts Film Festival, the Melbourne International Film Festival, Cinéma du Réel, the Black Star Film Festival, the Edinburgh International Film Festival, Vienna International Film Festival, New York Film Festival, Filmadrid International Film Festival, TIFF Lightbox, Festival du Nouveau Cinema, Hamburg International Short Film Festiva, the Media City Film Festival, and Porto Post Doc Film and Media Festival.

This program is part of the faculty lecture series. On the mornings of home football games, hear from some of UVA’s top minds. Lifetime Learning in the Office of Engagement partners with the Alumni Association in offering these faculty lectures. All talks are free, open to all, and held at 10 am in Alumni Hall when available.

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