The Plunder of Black America

How the Racial Wealth Gap Was Made

Calvin Schermerhorn

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Hardback

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English

Yale University Press
26 June 2025

History of the Americas; Poverty & unemployment; Social discrimination; Ethnic minorities & multicultural studies; Economic history

The long history of the racial wealth gap in America told through the stories of seven Black families who struggled to build wealth over multiple generations

Wealth is central to the American pursuit of happiness and is an overriding measure of well-being. Yet wealth is conspicuously absent from African American households. Why do some 3.5 million Black American families have zero or negative wealth?

Historian Calvin Schermerhorn traces four hundred years of Black dispossession and decapitalization—what Frederick Douglass called plunder—through the stories of families who have strived to earn and keep the fruits of their toils. Their struggles reveal that the ever-evolving strategies to strip Black income and wealth have been critical to sustaining a structure of racialized disadvantage. These accounts also tell of the quiet heroism of those who worked to overcome obstacles and defy the plunder.

From the story of Anthony and Mary Johnson, abducted from Angola and brought to Virginia in 1619, to the enslaved Black workers dispossessed by the Custis-Washington family, to Venture Smith (born Broteer Furro), who purchased his freedom, to three generations of a family enslaved in the South who moved north after Emancipation, to the Tulsa massacre and the subprime lending crisis, Schermerhorn shows that we cannot reckon with today's racial wealth inequality without understanding its unrelenting role in American history.

By: Calvin Schermerhorn
Imprint: Yale University Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 235mm, Width: 156mm,
ISBN: 9780300258950
ISBN 10: 030025895X
Pages: 304
Publication Date: 26 June 2025
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

Calvin Schermerhorn is a professor of history in the School of Historical, Philosophical, and Religious Studies at Arizona State University. His books include The Business of Slavery and the Rise of American Capitalism, 1815–1860, and Unrequited Toil: A History of United States Slavery. He lives in Tempe, AZ.

Reviews for The Plunder of Black America: How the Racial Wealth Gap Was Made

“Calvin Schermerhorn's The Plunder of Black America demands the attention of the global academy by combining a wide array of secondary literature with deep analysis of new primary sources. It is essential reading for anyone concerned with the past, present, and future of wealth, poverty, and racial injustice.”—Walter D. Greason, Macalester College “Never reducing Black lives to mere numbers, Calvin Schermerhorn has given readers an intimate look at the effects of the racial “wealth gap,” as well as the determination and spirit of those individuals struggling against it.”—Carole Emberton, author of To Walk About in Freedom: The Long Emancipation of Priscilla Joyner