The looting and burning of black neighbourhoods occurred right throughout the 1920s, and it's relevant today for the points I make in my last paragraph.
The destruction of 35 square blocks of the thriving area of black entrepreneurship in Tulsa, Oklahoma known as "Black Wall Street" was just the first major massacre of the successful black middle class in the 1920s. After destroying their businesses and homes, and stealing their goods and land, white supremacists would erect a Civil War statue of a Confederate general to "watch over" the black neighbourhood and let them know there would never be a possibility for advancement. Remember those "nice" statues that the Trump KKK and Nazi supporters wanted to protect a few years back?
After WWII, the US slowed a renewed race war by whites against blacks by the largest handout of taxpayer money in US history. Any white man who served, even nominally, was eligible for low-cost mortgages, low-interest loans and financial support under the GI Bill. The first 67,000 taxpayer-subsidised mortgages all went to white men, except for a dozen or so where the federal government didn't realise they were giving money to black men. Remember those lovely new houses and suburbs in the Golden Era of the 1950s that Trump supporters hark back to?
And this is what is relevant today. Posters here and elsewhere perpetuate the myth that blacks in the US have poverty and crime because of their own choices. Whites point to the golden 1950s as evidence of the wealth and idyllic conditions they created by hard work. Both are myths.
Blacks in the US were successful in many areas up to the time after WWI. Then their wealth was taken away. Whites in the US were poor and less successful in many areas up to the time after WWII. Then they were given the biggest socialist handout of taxpayer money in history. And yet they still somehow believe today they were responsible for their newfound wealth.
