The Other Abraham Lincoln: Creating Black Wealth

A lot is known about President Abraham Lincoln and his time as the nation’s Chief Executive Officer, except maybe this: Lincoln was focused on helping to create Black wealth in America.  Yes, you read that correctly.

What Lincoln was up to had nothing to do with race relations, or anything directly tied to Black or White issues, per se.  If there was any color involved here ultimately, it was the color green. The color of U.S. currency.

In other words, Lincoln was not 'pitching for Black people.'  In fact, this is not even a 'racial' post, even though it focuses on the dignity of the Black experience in America.  It is simply historical, hopefully instructive, and hopefully, inspirational to you.   It is a lesson in (real) leadership.

1. Lincoln wanted build a nation that worked.  A plan that would not fall apart.

He knew that after slavery and the ravages of the civil war, he had to achieve this end, in order to set America right again.  It was practical and pragmatic. It was rational. It was a radical movement of common sense.

He knew instinctively that he had to do this in order to re-imagine and to grow what one might call 'a sustainable national vision,' for a best-in-class nation.  

Not just for the benefit of Black people, but a sustainable national narrative for all people.  

A national ambition big enough for everyone's hopes, dreams and aspirations for a life better, to fit within.

2. By helping Black Americans to create their own wealth, and with that jobs and opportunity, he was also promoting something we can all agree on in principle: self-reliance and self-determination.    In doing this, Lincoln was not acting like a Republican or a Democratic leader, but simply a good and responsible leader.  A leader for all people.

On March 3rd, 1865, President Abraham Lincoln signed landmark legislation creating the Freedman's Bureau, which in turn created the Freedman's Bank. The Freedman's Bank mission: to teach freed slaves about money and the free enterprise system.  

President Abraham Lincoln knew something then that took me my entire life to understand: the first step to freedom is personal and physical liberty, and social justice and civil rights, such as the right to free speech, and the right to vote.  

But Lincoln also understood what I call the second step to real freedom, and I believe the modern definition of freedom itself; freedom defined as 'self determination.'

But here is the catch.  You cannot 'self determine yourself,' except through an understanding of the free enterprise system, and understanding money and wealth building -- or at the very least how job creation -- works.  

To quote my personal hero and HOPE Global Spokesman Ambassador Andrew Young, "to live in a system of free enterprise, but to not understand the very rules of free enterprise, must be the very definition of slavery."

Lincoln's vision for a bank for former slaves was extinguished when the President was assassinated a mere 5 weeks later, but what happened next is amazing nonetheless.  A businessman and real estate owner otherwise known as abolitionist Frederick Douglass, decided to try to save the bank.  He decided he would accept the calls on him to run the bank himself, even investing $10,000 of his own money (think 20M today).  He too knew how important this was.  

Unfortunately, the gaming and manipulation of the bank, by President Andrew Johnson's influence peddling friends in Washington, DC, was too far gone, and Douglass formally asked Congress to close the bank in 1874.  

When the bank closed, it had 73,000 Black depositors, with deposits equal to more than 50B today, which would make it one of the top 100 largest banks in the nation today, by asset size alone.

Adding even more intrigue to this story, 151 years ago this month, or two months before Lincoln signed into law the Freedman's Bank, Lincoln's Secretary of War Stanton and General Sherman traveled to Savannah, Georgia, where they met with 20 Black ministers, asking 'what do you want after the Civil War?'  Did they say they wanted a hand out program or social welfare? Absolutely not. They said they 'wanted land.'  They wanted ownership.  They wanted to 'do for themselves.'

With Lincoln's blessing, Sherman and Stanton issued what is known historically as 'Field Action 15,' which allocated 400,000 acres from South Carolina south, down the coast and 30 miles, in to what we now know to be south Florida, 'for the benefit of the settlement of freed slaves.'  I will tell this story in more fullness later, but in short, Field Action 15 allocated 400,000 acres to former slaves. Allowing them for the first time ever to own land as their own.  This is also where the phrase '40 Acres and a Mule' originated.

Unfortunately, Lincoln assassination, and the ascendancy of his Vice President, a southern segregationist by the name of Andrew Johnson, ended all hopes of 'American prosperity for all' during that era.  

Andrew Johnson cancelled Field Action 15 in 1865, and proceeded to undermine the Freedman's Bank, and all other initiatives of self-reliance and dignity advanced by Lincoln. 

And with this, Johnson also crippled the nation's best hope, to fully heal from slavery, the Civil War, and our tragic separation with our brothers and sisters (both white and black I mean here) in the southern states of America.  

His action also tragically ended -- or at least forestalled -- the subsequent creation of a new generation of American stakeholders. The creation of more American pie.

I literally believe that the undermining and subsequent failure of Lincoln's plan -- for land (ownership) and a bank (education about money, investment, thrift, savings, access to capital) -- results today in the vast ghettos, and jobless communities we see scattered across the nation.  

It results in the seeds of a (jobless) Ferguson, a (jobless) Baltimore, and the then jobless South Central Los Angeles, that sparked the Rodney King Riots of 1992.

To quote my friend Van Jones, "the best way to stop a bullet is a job."  But no one ever taught Black America how to create jobs in our communities. 

2. This new story underscores President Lincoln as what author Malcolm Gladwell would call, an ‘Outlier.’  

3. It goes beyond Lincoln’s reputation of bringing into his Administration different voices, from radically different sides of the Republican and Democratic political establishment — widely known to historians as 'his Team of Rivals.’  

4. What Lincoln sought was not the dominance of a Republican Party, nor a Democratic Party, but a Get It Done Party.  Lincoln just wanted to get things done.   

Many of our so-called leaders today seem almost allergic to 'getting anything done.'  Many of these so-called leaders today are experts at what they don't like, which of course is -- not leadership.

5. Lincoln had the courage to ‘remake and reimagine everything.'   To build an inclusive and aspirational economy that was built to last.  Where people -- all people -- have a true opportunity to either get a job, create a job, or 'do for themselves.'   

6. President Lincoln was what you might call the ultimate 'teach a man how to fish' leader, with a dose of compassion, empathy, and an understanding that we all did not come from, or even start from, the same place.

I wrote about Lincoln and the untold story of the Freedman's Bank in my bestselling book, "How The Poor Can Save Capitalism: Rebuilding the Path to the Middle Class. The Solution for the 100%."  

At Operation HOPE we set out on a national tour -- really a series of conversations with our nation's leaders and leadership -- spreading the word about the Freedman's Bank.  How 150 years later, we now are just beginning to realize that an entire group of people 'never got The Memo on the free enterprise system' in America. 

And then came our work on the ground with Operation HOPE's Project 5117, because we needed to do more than simply talk.  This is another Lincoln lesson. Don't just talk!

We opened HOPE Inside locations, inside of traditional bank branches to start. Working today to turn every traditional bank, into a modern day Freedman's Bank; raising credit scores to 700 for all area residents.  

"Nothing changes your life more, than maybe God or love, than moving your credit score 120 points," which we do in our HOPE Inside locations nationwide.

Opening HOPE Inside for Kids locations, mostly in our public school houses. Creating young entrepreneurs through HOPE Business In A Box Academies, and a bold new rebirth of an internship generation, through our HOPE B- Business Compact school sites.  

Later in 2015, I went to report on our progress to Treasury Secretary Jack Lew, whom I served as a member of the U.S. President's Advisory Council on Financial Capability for Young Americans.  Secretary Lew and I discussed the possible 'formal recognition' of the historic location where the Freedman's Bank was originally located, which was directly across the street from the U.S. Treasury Department and the White House.  

The cynic might say 'the dreamer is a fool,' but where would the world be without dreamers?  Secretary Jack Lew responded: 'yes, we can work on that.'

On this Thursday, January 7th, 2016, U.S. Treasury Secretary Jack Lew will do something more aspirational and inspiring for poor and struggling people in this country than quite possibly any Treasury Secretary since Alexander Hamilton.  On this day Secretary Lew will unveil the U.S. Treasury Annex Building, as the new and renamed Freedman’s Bank Building.  

Secretary Lew's action only underscores that badness is merely failed goodness, and that darkness has no definition, without light.  That rainbows only follow storms.  You literally cannot have a rainbow without a storm first.

We must all be bold and audacious dreamers again, but also, we must learn to 'do for ourselves.'  The best anti-poverty program is education, and the best antidote to hopelessness is a (good) job.  

We must have a mission in our life --  everyday  -- that we get up to and for. Something just for ourselves.  Something we own.

To quote my late, great friend Dr. Dorothy I Height, "John, I like you because you are a dreamer with a shovel in your hands."  We must emerge in 2016 and beyond, all of us, as 'dreamers with a shovel of hope in our hands.'  

This is our nation, and our world, and we can make (and remake) her into whatever we want.  Lincoln had the dream, but we can make dream-making real.

Thanks Secretary Jack Lew, for doing your part.

Let's go.

John Hope Bryant is the Founder, Chairman and CEO of Operation HOPE and Bryant Group Ventures, a Thinker-In-Residence 800-CEO-READ, and an Inc. Magazine/800-CEO-READ bestselling business author of LOVE LEADERSHIP: The New Way to Lead in a Fear-Based World (Jossey-Bass). 

His newest bestselling book is How The Poor Can Save Capitalism: Rebuilding the Path to the Middle Class (Berrett Koehler Publishing), which was voted aTop Book for 2014.

Bryant is a Member of the U.S. President's Advisory Council on Financial Capability for Young Americans, co-founder of the Gallup-HOPE Index with the Gallup Organization, and co-chair for Project 5117, which is a plan for the rebirth of underserved America.

Bryant is the only bestselling author on economics in the world who is also of African-American descent.  

Operation HOPE, founded by Bryant, is directly responsible for the U.S. government establishing financial literacy as U.S. federal government policy in 2008.

Follow John Hope Bryant on LinkedIn Influencers here