Post-slavery exclusion from unions, jobs, and schools blocked Black wealth building.

Evidence

Even Black Americans who did not experience theft and violence were continually deprived of the ability to build wealth. They were denied entry into labor unions and turned away from union jobs that ensured middle-class wages. In both the North and the South, racist hiring laws and policies forced them into service jobs even when they held college degrees. Communities legally relegated them into segregated, substandard neighborhoods and segregated, substandard schools that made it impossible for them to compete economically even had they not faced rampant discrimination in the job market. In the South, for most of the period between the Civil War and the 1960s, nearly all of the Black people who wanted to earn professional degrees—law, medical, and master’s degrees—had to leave the region to do so, even as white immigrants attended state colleges in the former Confederacy that Black American tax dollars helped pay for. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 1359