Emancipated Black Americans began with virtually no capital or property.

Evidence

We are often taught in school that Lincoln “freed the slaves,” but we are not prodded to contemplate what it means to achieve freedom without a home to live in, without food to eat, a bed to sleep on, clothes for your children, or money to buy any of it. Narratives collected from formerly enslaved people for the 1930s Federal Writers’ Project reveal the horrors of massive starvation, of “liberated” Black people seeking shelter in burned-out buildings and scrounging for food in decaying fields before eventually succumbing to the heartbreak of returning to bend over in the fields of their former enslavers, as sharecroppers, just so they would not die. “With the advent of emancipation,” writes the historian Keri Leigh Merritt, “Blacks became the only race in the U.S. ever to start out, as an entire people, with close to zero capital.” — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 1351

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the book’s core reframing argument that freedom without economic foundation was a design choice, not an omission; parallels Milgrom’s institutions argument about what makes exchange viable.
• SEED: The Federal Writers’ Project narratives as a primary source for post-emancipation conditions could anchor an essay on how origin stories skip the material aftermath.