Africa’s and America’s Forgotten Need Access to Capital

Both supporters and detractors of the 1619 Project can recognize that focusing solely on the struggles of those brought to the American colonies as permanent slaves tells only one part of the story of African colonization and its ongoing impacts both on the African continent and worldwide. Yet both in the United States and across the African continent, true liberation began only in the aftermath of World War II.Six years after Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 signaled the end of two-tiered segregation in the United States, France released several of its African colonies. The United Kingdom, Portugal, and Belgium ceded colonial control in the 1960s and 1970s, but not until 1994 did South Africa officially end Apartheid. Today, Africa is a hotbed of entrepreneurship, though still plagued by lack of access to capital. But young Africans are working to overcome obstacles to their own future prosperity and that of their kinfolk. Their tenacity provides insights in how forgotten Americans, too, can escape the economic Apartheid that has hindered black entrepreneurship in this nation at least since the Tulsa riots destroyed Black Wall Street a century ago.In the early years after liberation, many African nations with little capital opted for a socialist economic …