Calvin Schermerhorn’s 2025 book, The Plunder of Black America: How the Racial Wealth Gap Was Made, presents a historical examination of how African Americans have been systematically stripped of economic value across generations. Through the intimate narratives of seven Black families from the 1600s to the present, Schermerhorn illustrates that the racial wealth disparity was not caused by poor financial decisions or lack of effort, but by deliberate disinvestment and exploitation embedded in American economic structures.
One central story follows Morris, an enslaved woodworker forced to build coffins for the Custis family before being transferred with 42 others to George Washington’s Mount Vernon estate. There, his skilled labor contributed to expanding the mansion into a 11,000-square-foot residence with 21 bedrooms and helped transform swampy farmland into a 7,600-acre agribusiness. Despite this, Morris received no compensation, and the wealth generated from his work enriched only white landowners. Enslavers captured approximately two-thirds of the economic value produced by Black labor, ensuring that prosperity remained inaccessible to those who created it.
Post-emancipation, the mechanisms of extraction evolved. During the Civil War, Black soldiers were paid less than white counterparts and denied equivalent post-service benefits. Union veteran Sam Goings, for example, died at 39 from war-related tuberculosis, but his disability was never certified, leaving his family without support. In the 20th century, New Deal programs excluded most Black workers, particularly in agriculture and domestic service, while Black veterans were frequently denied GI Bill benefits. These exclusions had lasting consequences, as seen in the Rivers family of South Carolina, who lost their land—purchased in 1886—when 24 members were evicted in 2001. Nationally, African Americans lost 14 million of the 15 million acres they had acquired since emancipation.
The Ragsdale family’s experience further underscores persistent barriers. Hartwell Ragsdale survived the 1921 Tulsa massacre, and his son Lincoln, a Tuskegee airman, returned to build multiple businesses in Phoenix. Despite his achievements, he was denied fair access to capital. Banks refused him low-interest GI loans and instead subjected his ventures to redlining and subprime financing. He described Phoenix as “unquestionably the Mississippi of the West,” highlighting how discriminatory practices stifled Black entrepreneurship. From 1974 to 1984, only 21 of the top 100 Black-owned firms survived; by 2014, just two remained.
Economic shocks have disproportionately impacted Black wealth. The 1873 financial panic erased about half of African Americans’ liquid assets—a loss mirrored in the 2008 housing crisis, which reduced Black wealth by 48 percent. Today, Black families often pay more per square foot for homes yet sell them at lower prices, perpetuating cycles of financial instability. Schermerhorn connects these patterns to broader systemic failures, including biased courts, unequal education, and urban segregation, even in regions without formal Jim Crow laws.
In the book’s conclusion, Schermerhorn advocates for restorative policies such as baby bonds, student debt relief, community reinvestment funds, and reparations. While these proposals remain politically challenging, he emphasizes that justice requires confronting historical and ongoing economic dispossession. The narratives serve not just as evidence but as human testaments to resilience amid structural betrayal.
— news from Los Angeles Review of Books
— News Original —
The Plunder of Black America: How the Racial Wealth Gap Was Made by Calvin Schermerhorn . Yale University Press , 2025. 304 pages.
IN HIS BRILLIANT new book The Plunder of Black America: How the Racial Wealth Gap Was Made, Calvin Schermerhorn traces the practice of racialized economic piracy in the United States through the stories of seven Black families spanning from the 17th century to the 21st. Each chapter follows a single family and functions almost like an intergenerational photo album, capturing and exhibiting their struggle to survive.
Schermerhorn chronicles the families’ daily grind and their labor, which runs across the economic spectrum: they’re planters, sharecroppers, educators, engineers, middle managers, business owners. The intimate portraits that Schermerhorn creates allow the stories to perform the main work of his argument:
African Americans did not lose or squander wealth on the ongoing road from enslavement to equality. Black people did not invest unwisely or fritter away the fruits of their labor. Instead, each time the American economy changed, the agents of change have dispossessed, disinherited, or decapitalized African Americans.
Several chapters are masterpieces, bringing readers into the families and allowing us to reexamine the lives that were woven into the tapestry of American history. One chapter follows a man named Morris, a skilled woodworker enslaved by the Virginians Daniel and Martha Custis. Morris is tasked with crafting coffins for the family—first for a deceased two-year-old son, and then for a daughter and for Daniel. The widow Martha goes on to marry Colonel/General/President George Washington, making the hallowed “father” of our nation an intimate participant in Morris’s story.
As the book pivots between Washington and Morris, Schermerhorn focuses on the hard facts of labor and finances—piracy and plunder—embodied in their relationship as enslaver and enslaved. Following Washington’s marriage, Morris and 42 other enslaved people were ripped away from their families and friends and transported 100 miles to the plantation of Mount Vernon. With the expertise of Morris and other enslaved laborers, the Mount Vernon mansion was transformed, growing from a spacious house to a lordly manor encompassing 21 bedrooms and 11,000 square feet. As the slaves expanded Mount Vernon, they also worked “to turn a hodgepodge of swampy tobacco farms into an integrated agribusiness” whose reach extended to 7,600 acres. When Washington took note of inefficiencies, he “paid overseers to force [the slaves] to work.” Schermerhorn’s prose is haunting: “From below, Washington’s management structure felt like an exquisitely calibrated income reaper, forcing Black labor value up the chain by pushing violence down it.”
Morris himself later played a part in that violence as he rose to the role of overseer at the Dogue Run tract. It’s worth noting here that this was a piece of land he could have purchased if he had simply received pay for his labor. Instead, he was forced into the existing cycle. At Washington’s order, Morris forced the plantation’s children to work. “I expect,” wrote Washington, “to reap the benefit of their labour myself.” Morris’s enslaved status also ensured that the wealth his work generated would remain exclusively in white pockets as “enslavers plundered roughly £2 of every £3 in Black labor value.” Morris’s labor provided the wealth for Washington to live in a lavish manor and the revenue stream to place even more people into bondage as his plantation expanded. Meanwhile, Morris’s family received little more than “subsistence-level food, clothing, and shelter.” By rooting his narrative in Mount Vernon and focusing on Morris, Schermerhorn attempts to shift the fulcrum of our understanding of this nation’s history. Morris’s story shows us just how far the country was from the ideals heralded at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia. Instead, it was built on the brutal and racialized economic system of the plantation—one that the Constitution was designed to perpetuate.
In other chapters, Schermerhorn’s post-emancipation stories trace the evolution of racialized piracy as the plunder moves from the hands of enslavers to the invisible hands of public policies and institutions. During the Civil War, Black soldiers did not receive the same pay as their white counterparts, and following the war, Black soldiers received fewer benefits for their service. Schermerhorn traces the aftermath of these policies through the story of Union army veteran Sam Goings. For Goings, as for many Black veterans, poverty and racialized medical care proved lethal: he died of tuberculosis contracted during the war, and physicians refused to certify his disability. He was only 39 years old, and he left behind a wife and four children.
In the 20th century, the same racialized pattern of public benefits reemerged with the New Deal, which ultimately excluded the majority of Black families. Black veterans were, once again, largely denied GI benefits. Black farmers and sharecroppers received little from the Agricultural Adjustment Act, while domestic and agricultural laborers were whittled out of Social Security protections. To show the collective impact of Black exclusion from public benefits, Schermerhorn chronicles the story of a South Carolina family, the Rivers, following them from the late 19th century through the early 21st. The family labors for generations, and yet that does not provide them with a financial foundation. Instead, racist economic policies leave them—and the thousands of families they represent—in financial quicksand. Schermerhorn brings their story to a close in 2001 as 24 members of the Rivers family are evicted from the land the family purchased in 1886. Schermerhorn summarizes: “[A]cross the nation, African American families lost 14 million of the 15 million acres of land they had acquired since Emancipation.”
Another chapter is dedicated to the Ragsdale family, beginning with Hartwell Ragsdale’s narrow escape from white terrorists during the 1921 Tulsa massacre. By 1944, the focus of the story shifts to his son Lincoln, who enlisted in the army during World War II and rose to become a Tuskegee airman, trained for combat in the cockpits of P-51 Mustang fighters. On the day the younger Ragsdale was commissioned as an officer, he was brutally attacked by domestic fascists—including Alabama policemen—while still in his officer’s uniform. Afterward, Ragsdale was transferred to Phoenix, where he began building his life after the war. He founded multiple business ventures, from mortuaries to real estate, construction, and insurance companies. And yet every step up that economic ladder was precarious, each rung fragile. Regular banks refused the low-interest GI loans to which he was entitled. Despite that, he got his businesses up, only for the same banks to prey on his profits by redlining his real estate out of the best home loans and restricting him to subprime loans. As Ragsdale’s companies expanded, they were continually hounded by the “interlocking disadvantages” that trapped so many Black Americans in intergenerational poverty, leading Ragsdale to refer to Phoenix as “unquestionably the Mississippi of the West.” For Schermerhorn, Ragsdale’s story epitomizes the struggle of Black-owned businesses and helps us understand why only “twenty-one of the top one hundred Black-owned firms survived from 1974 to 1984, and, of those, just two remained in 2004 and 2014.”
The Plunder of Black America positions its readers to see the bigger picture and consistent historical themes. The financial panic of 1873 cost Black America an estimated 50 percent of their liquid wealth, a figure similar to the 48 percent drop in Black wealth following the 2008 housing crash. Schermerhorn’s stories connect slave cabins to the decapitalization of redlining to today’s real estate market in which Black families are set up to pay “more for each square foot than whites buying the same house,” only to be forced to sell it for less. As a collection, the stories hit on almost all of the factors that contribute to our nation’s imbalance in racial wealth: education and religion, land dispossession and gerrymandering, racist courts and criminal justice systems, as well as the racialization of cities with no history of either Jim Crow or slavery. In Schermerhorn’s hands, this list takes on the flesh and blood of family life—stats become stories, and we must reckon not simply with what happened but also with the real people it happened to.
In the book’s conclusion, Schermerhorn turns his attention to concrete public policies that embody the principle that “justice demands restitution.” He casts an expansive eye that ranges from baby bonds to student loan forgiveness, community development funds to combat disinvestment, and an array of reparations initiatives. It is here, in the conclusion, that Schermerhorn seems to leave a chasm between his intimate family portraits and the impersonal public policies he proposes—which, particularly at this moment, seem to have little collective willpower behind them. The question left unaddressed is how we become the people who make these changes possible. After all, the most meaningful wrestling match isn’t with the failures of our ancestors but with our own.