*The Color of Money*

The author is Mehrsa Baradaran, and the subtitle is Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap.  Here is one excerpt:

Not only were black bankers stuck in a perpetual money pit, but they were often cast as the villains when thing went wrong.  That their loans went primarily to the black middle class and were out of reach of the majority of blacks sometimes made black banks the targets of criticism.  Abram Harris was one of these critics.  Harris was the first nationally renowned black economist and the first to do a comprehensive study of black banks, called The Negro as Capitalist (1936).  Harris headed the Howard economics department from 1936 to 1945, when he became the first black economist at the University of Chicago.  He was recruited there by Frank Knight…Harris had held Marxist sympathies while at Howard, but with his move to Chicago, his economic philosophy became more traditional.

Here is Wikipedia on Harris.  As for Baradaran, I found this to be “two books in one.”  First, it was an OK and useful but not original look at the evolution of the racial wealth gap.  Second, it was a very interesting but interspersed history of black banking in America.  Overall recommended.  Here is the book’s home page.

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