Erased Prosperity

Across the United States, African Americans built towns, neighborhoods, business districts, farms, institutions and landowning communities despite slavery's aftermath, segregation, disenfranchisement and discriminatory laws.

Some became centers of Black entrepreneurship and generational wealth. Others represented something equally significant: Black families owning their homes, farms and land, and establishing communities where they could build independent lives.

Many of these communities were later attacked, burned, emptied, divided, condemned, seized, flooded, demolished or displaced.

The mechanisms were not all the same. Some communities were destroyed through racial massacres and mob violence. Some experienced forced racial expulsion. Others lost land through intimidation, discriminatory government action, eminent domain, urban renewal, highway construction, redevelopment or other forms of displacement. Some rebuilt, only to experience a second wave of destruction decades later.

Erased Prosperity documents what existed before the destruction: the people, businesses, institutions, property, land, economic networks and communities that African Americans built, and what happened afterward.

This is a living historical collection. Additional communities and documentation will be added as research and verification continue.