We've been looking at Black Wall street all wrong!

I think we’ve been looking at Black Wall Street all wrong!

Black Wall street was a black-owned community with 108 businesses including newspapers, grocery stores, butchers, cafes, hotels, lawyers, doctors, banks and even a fire department - everything one would ever need for a functioning community.

And yet, when we talk about Black Wallstreet, we focus on the fact that it was burned down by jealous white supremacists, as though that’s the most important part!

Family, the most important part of Black Wall Street isn’t that it was burned down, it’s that it was built in the first place!

Do you guys know what was going on at that time?

The community was built in 1906. 50 years earlier they’d torn down a black community called Seneca Village so they could build Central Park. Black Codes, Jim Crow and segregation were in full effect, impacting every single aspect of black life, including voting, working and buying land. And lynchings were just a fact of life for “uppety Negroes”

And yet, black Americans were able to overcome all that and in only a few short years build the most famous and prosperous black urban community in the U.S.

There’s no surprise that white supremacists (in cahoots with the government) burned it down - that’s how they do. The surprise is that it was built in the first place under what many people would consider nowadays, insurmountable challenges.

No challenge is insurmountable. Challenges are everywhere, family. Your true character is measured by how you handle those challenges.

Let's stop looking at past challenges as failures and start looking at them as opportunities to learn and grow.

Black Americans have overcome over and over and over again. If the purpose of life is survival, you got this!

Learn more about how Black Wall Street started.

A challenge wasn't an excuse then, and it isn't one now!