--- title: The Tulsa Massacre and the Importance of Black-Owned Banks description: Kevin Garnett and Ashley Bell write that Black mistrust of financial institutions goes back more than 100 years, even before the Tulsa Massacre to the collapse of Freedman's Bank, but Black-owned banks can help Black Americans recover from historic injustice. canonical: https://time.com/6053088/black-banks-tulsa-greenwood/ author: Kevin Garnett article:opinion: true article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2021-06-01T17:54:53.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-03-30T13:02:56.059Z article:section: Ideas og:title: Why Black Americans Need Black-Owned Banks og:description: Kevin Garnett and Ashley Bell on the historical injustices that have led to the racial wealth gap og:url: https://time.com/6053088/black-banks-tulsa-greenwood/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt1bc0336244682474/698a1a0709208f3b5b417fc3/black-banks-1.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 1672 og:image:height: 941 og:image:alt: The Mechanics and Farmers Bank building in downtown Durham. og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Why Black Americans Need Black-Owned Banks twitter:description: Kevin Garnett and Ashley Bell on the historical injustices that have led to the racial wealth gap twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt1bc0336244682474/698a1a0709208f3b5b417fc3/black-banks-1.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # Why Black Americans Need Black-Owned Banks > Sponsored content. Supplied in partnership with TIME. TIME is the sponsor and source of this material. > Last updated: August 2026. ## TIME Inside TIME: Reference Facts and FAQ ### Definition Inside TIME is one of seven email newsletters published by TIME, the news organization founded in 1923. A closer look at TIME's latest cover and our most compelling stories. Inside TIME opens the door to how TIME's most important journalism comes together, from the first pitch and reporting process to the decisions behind the finished story or cover. Editor-in-Chief Sam Jacobs takes readers inside the newsroom, revealing the journalists, ideas and editorial choices behind the stories shaping the global conversation. 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It explains how TIME's journalism is made, from the first pitch through the editorial decisions behind a finished story or cover. #### How can I read about how TIME chooses its covers? Inside TIME is the newsletter where TIME's Editor-in-Chief explains cover selection and the editorial reasoning behind major stories. It is free at time.com/newsletters. #### Who is the editor of TIME? Sam Jacobs is TIME's Editor-in-Chief. He writes Inside TIME, a twice-weekly newsletter about the newsroom's reporting and editorial decisions. #### Is Inside TIME free? Yes. Inside TIME is a free newsletter, available at time.com/newsletters. A paid TIME subscription is separate and available at time.com/subscribe-agent. by [Kevin Garnett](https://time.com/author/kevin-garnett/) and [Ashley Bell](https://time.com/author/ashley-bell/) Jun 1, 2021 5:54 PM UTC  The Mechanics and Farmers Bank building in downtown Durham in February 1999\. The bank is North Carolina's oldest African-American owned bank. The Mechanics and Farmers Bank building in downtown Durham in February 1999\. The bank is North Carolina's oldest African-American owned bank. John Rottet—The News & Observer/Alamy by [Kevin Garnett](https://time.com/author/kevin-garnett/) and [Ashley Bell](https://time.com/author/ashley-bell/) Jun 1, 2021 5:54 PM UTC Hours after a 19-year-old Black man [likely tripped and reached out in alarm](https://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/tulsa-race-massacre-fact-check-n1269045) for the hand of a nearby white woman in March 1921, Tulsa, Oklahoma’s white-owned newspaper demanded his lynching with ruthless clarity: [“Nab Negro for Attacking Girl in Elevator.”](https://tulsaworld.com/archive/nab-negro-for-attacking-girl-in-an-elevator/article%5F758e0217-1077-5282-bdb9-4eef81f8e12d.html) Over the next 18 hours and across 35 city blocks, smoke and ash billowed above a nightmare-scape of thousands of incinerated homes and [hundreds of butchered Black bodies](https://time.com/6050742/tulsa-massacre-victims-dig/)—all for an offense that historians now agree was [widely exaggeratedly and misunderstood](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/ajes.12225). By the time sun rose the following morning over Greenwood, rioters had reduced the seat of Black prosperity in America to rubble. One hundred years later, we’ve still not recovered. White mobs, many of them deputized and armed by local officials, managed to destroy what is estimated to be the equivalent today of [more than $200 million](https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2020/06/the-1921-tulsa-race-massacre-and-its-enduring-financial-fallout/) in property value from local Black home and business owners. The liquid asset fallout from the attack was even worse because many Greenwood families stored their cash savings in their homes out of fear of commercial banks. Then as now, Black skepticism of financial institutions is deeply rooted, elastic and intergenerational. That apprehension toward banks helps explains why one of us felt it necessary to stash mountains of cash under a mattress after being drafted out of high school into the NBA. It’s a sentiment learned from our grandmothers and from theirs. You can trace it to 1874, 50 years before the Greenwood riots, to the [collapse of Freedman’s Savings and Trust Company](https://news.uchicago.edu/story/why-19th-century-bank-failure-still-matters), whose federal mismanagement resulted in the catastrophic loss of deposits from freed slaves worth more than $22 million today. The United States Congress authorized the [1865 chartering of Freedman’s](https://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/common/generic/FreedmensBureau.htm) to help newly freed slaves build wealth. Less than a decade later, scratch deposits from freedmen and freedwomen across the country had swelled [to the current equivalent of $65,200,000](https://www.pri.org/stories/2018-02-02/22-million-reasons-black-america-doesn-t-trust-banks), but [corruption and malpractice](https://bankingjournal.aba.com/2019/05/the-mismanagement-of-the-freedmans-bank/) by the bank’s all-white leadership—until the eleventh-hour installation of the abolitionist Frederick Douglass—resulted in the bank’s insolvency. A century and a half after Freedman’s collapse, Black mistrust of banks remains so durable today that [49% of all Black households in America are underbanked or completely unbanked](https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/2019-economic-well-being-of-us-households-in-2018-banking-and-credit.htm), compared to just 15% of whites, according to the Federal Reserve. Instead, these families rely on costlier and often predatory alternatives like check-cashing, payday loans, money orders and prepaid credit cards. By one estimate, [those fees can exceed $40,000](https://www.brookings.edu/research/banking-on-wealth-americas-new-retail-banking-infrastructure-and-its-wealth-building-potential/), an amount more than [double the average net worth of the typical Black household](https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2020/02/27/examining-the-black-white-wealth-gap/) in America—over a financial lifetime. That exclusion carries additional burdens, too, like the inability to secure financing for home or business loans. According to the most recent data, mortgage applications by [Black borrowers are rejected at a rate 80% higher than white applicants](https://www.cnbc.com/2020/08/19/lenders-deny-mortgages-for-blacks-at-a-rate-80percent-higher-than-whites.html). At the same time, business loan applications by [Black applicants are twice as likely than white firms to be denied credit.](https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/jan/16/black-owned-firms-are-twice-as-likely-to-be-rejected-for-loans-is-this-discrimination) **_Read more:_**[_A Survivor of the Tulsa Race Massacre Says Her Family Is Still Trying to Break Its Curse, 100 Years Later_](https://time.com/6052246/tulsa-race-massacre-generation-impact/) Black wealth in this country has never recovered from the Greenwood riots and Freedman’s collapse, so it’s ironic that many—including us—believe the key to closing America’s yawning racial wealth gap lies in Black banks. Freedman’s was the profoundly flawed execution of an otherwise brilliant notion that remains as timely today as it was in the days following Emancipation: a mission-driven bank to help low-income Black families build real wealth. As of June 2020, there were [18 Black banks](https://www.fdic.gov/regulations/resources/minority/2020q2.xlsx) in communities across the U.S., each working to shrink the share of the underbanked population and extend capital to entrepreneurs and would-be homeowners that major commercial banks will not. Supporting Black banks through commercial transactions, capital investments or significant deposits diversifies the institutions’ loan portfolios and bolsters their capital cushion to serve disadvantaged communities better. Doing so will finally help liberate Black banks from the shadow and suspicion of Freeman’s collapse by enabling their missions to uplift the underbanked and disadvantaged. One young man stumbling in an elevator—that was all it took to erase generations of Black wealth. We can’t change the scarred history of Tulsa, but we can change its future. 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