Slavery has influenced the poverty that affects African-Americans in the 21st century. After being freed from bondage after several generations, blacks had no way to establish themselves, so many of them continued working for whites in the sharecropping system, which was practically still slavery because blacks remained in poverty as they worked for their former masters.

Blacks that did try to establish wealth were thwarted by racist mobs that intimidated and killed blacks in order to keep them from succeeding. For decades after slavery ended, there were no laws to protect blacks, so they could be raped, beaten, and killed with no consequences. Blacks didn’t have the luxury of getting a college education and even if they did, segregation didn’t allow them to work in the white, corporate world. The only job options for most blacks were manual labor and low-paying service jobs. A significant number of black Americans remained in poverty for generations because they could not accumulate wealth to have something to pass on to their children, who could in turn pass on to their children.

Many American white people are wealthy today because their ancestors passed on money and property to each successive generation. Blacks, on the other hand, didn’t have this option. My own mother was a sharecropper and grew up picking cotton on a plantation in the 40’s and 50’s. Pictures of my ancestors in those days look no different than the pictures of slaves in many history books. Needless to say, my grandparents were barely scraping by and they eventually moved north, only to get low-paying jobs and still barely scraped by. As an adult, my mom worked in hotels and restaurants for low pay and my generation (Generation X) was the first generation in our family where people went to college.

Although some of my cousins and I went to college, we are by no means wealthy. We have more money than our parents had, but in this economy we still struggle financially and it will be at least a couple more generations to get our foot in the “door of wealth”. There are other cousins who did not go to college and they have kids, so their struggle is even greater than the ones with no kids.

Because of the lack of accumulative wealth in African-American families, each generation has to start from scratch because there is no financial help available. When we turn sixteen, our parents can’t afford to buy us a car. When we move into our first apartment, our parents don’t have money to help with the security deposit or to buy housewares and furniture, we are on our own.

Education has helped many African-Americans break this cycle in the last few decades, but there are many more with no education and no opportunity to move up the economic ladder. If black people would have been allowed to prosper freely after slavery ended then we wouldn’t be in the economic crisis that we are in now.