This is an opinion column.

This isn’t our first fight. Not even close.

It’s not our first faceoff against efforts to demean, diminish and deter us. To derail our inalienable right to thrive economically. To build wealth.

Nor are Donald Trump and insecure, DEI-phobic, scared-of-a fair-fight Republicans our first foes.

I could rewind much further into our nation’s history, but I’ll stop at 1874, at the collapse of the Freedman’s Savings and Trust Company (known mostly as Freedman’s Bank). It was chartered by Congress nine years before as an institution for Blacks to save and grow wealth as they moved from enslavement to earning (many as newly paid members of the Union Army). Celebrated statesman Frederick Douglass said Feeedman’s would help Blacks glean “lessons of sobriety, wisdom, and economy, and to show them how to rise in the world.”

Within seven years, Freedman’s grew to 37 branches in 17 states and was said to hold more than $3.7 million in assets, equivalent to $95.7 million today.

Two years later, alas, the bank was doomed by a series of speculative, unscrupulous and corrupt moves among its all-white board. The primary culprit? Henry D. Cooke.

As finance committee chair, he approved several risky loans, including one to Senaca Sandstone Company, the under-capitalized business owned by his family. It was a clear conflict of interest as he also served on the board of the family-owned company. Yes, that was illegal even back then.

Sandstone was crushed that year by the collapse of a bank owned by Henry’s older brother, Jay, a collapse that triggered the national Panic of 1873. Caught in the economy’s free-fall, Freedman’s met its demise the following year, erasing the life savings of more than 61,000 Blacks whose assets, due to unfriendly political foes, were not federally secured.

Then, of course, there was “Black Wall Street,” the thriving Black community on the segregated north side of Tulsa, Oklahoma that was burned to the ground by envious whites in the Race Massacre of 1921. Hundreds of Blacks were killed, more than 1,200 Black homes and almost every Black-owned business was reduced to ashes.

As I’ve shared before, Tulsa was my hometown and my father was a massacre survivor.

Earlier this month, in the waning days of President Joe Biden’s administration, the Department of Justice issued a report validating what many of us already knew:

White Tulsans mounted a concerted effort to destroy a vibrant Black community…. Survivors were left without resources or recourse. In the aftermath, the City of Tulsa resisted offers of meaningful help to the victims and utterly failed to provide necessary aid or assistance, and efforts to seek justice through the courts foundered.

Kristen Clarke, former assistant attorney general of DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, called the massacre “a civil rights crime unique in its magnitude, barbarity, racist hostility and its utter annihilation of a thriving Black community.”

Once again, the life savings of hundreds of Black families were lost — $1.8 million in property loss claims ($27 million in today’s dollars, noted a 2001 Oklahoma commission report) were never paid.

The lessons of “sobriety, wisdom and economy” that Douglass touted, however, were learned, passed on to subsequent generations and bore much fruit in the early part of the 20th century, in spite of Black codes and Jim Crow.

“Black Wall Street” rose from the smoldering embers to once again be a thriving community that endured during my youth. Indeed, viable Black business centers and vibrant middle-class neighborhoods existed in many southern cities — including Birmingham, Montgomery and Mobile — into the 1970s.

Most of them no longer exist or are a frail shell of their peak, primarily due to racist policies like redlining (banks refused loans to homeowners in Black neighborhoods circled in red on maps); so-called “urban renewal” proved to be urban removal (properties were snatched under imminent domain with promises to rebuild that went unfulfilled); or the building of highways that fatally dissected the heart of Black areas.

There’s this, too, and it isn’t at all easy to write: We’re partly culpable, as well. Freed from legal segregation in public places with the signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, we eagerly spent money with businesses that previously wouldn’t hire us and disrespected us as customers and moved into areas that had walled us out.

In short, we left our own behind.

Left our businesses behind. Left our neighborhoods behind. Left some of our people behind until our once-thriving spaces were all but ghosts.

Now, we can get it right.

We must get it right as federal offices implode under Trump’s executive order to terminate “to the maximum extent allowed by law, all federal diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility and ‘environmental justice’ offices and positions,” according to a U.S. Office of Personnel Management memo, as reported by CNN.

As universities and publicly traded companies squirm following Trump’s bullying threats to investigate their DEI programs, potentially putting at risk billions in federal research dollars and contracts.

We must get it right as Trump lynches DEI.

As he proudly undoes decades of efforts to level economic pathways long tilted against us and others. Against Hispanics. Against the disabled. Against Americans who merely want to be. Against white women, even.

We must get it right 112 years after President Woodrow Wilson resegregated the federal workforce, demoting incomes of thousands of Black civil service workers.

Two years after the U.S. Supreme Court banned the consideration of race in college admissions, we must get it right.

And a year after Alabama Republicans — fueled by erroneous and ill-founded claims — passed a bill that Gov. Kay Ivey signed into law banning DEI at our colleges and other public institutions, we must get it right.

Target was the latest company to fold to Trump, announcing last Friday that it would trim many DEI initiatives, including intentionally hiring from groups historically underrepresented in retail.

Many reacted by demanding a boycott of weak-kneed retailers — a strategy that eventually cooked J. Crow in cities where businesses refused our business or relegated us to the back of the bus.

That’s understandable. Trump’s cut-and-pasting from Project 2025 (just as we knew he would), trying to make America white again.

Those who follow that blueprint deserve the heat.

I see another strategy, an alternative calling in this fight: A call to not leave our own behind. Not this time.

To not abandon the Black employees who depend on jobs at those companies to support themselves and their families and to save and build wealth.

To not neglect Black-owned entrepreneurs who fought to get their products on shelves.

To respond as strategically as our boycotting ancestors, but strategically for these times.

Just as Tulsa’s “Black Wall Street” and other successful Black business areas were birthed out of segregation, a new “Black Wall Street” can emerge from today’s anti-DEI foolishness — not as a place but as a collective mindset to, with all intentionality and whenever possible, spend our dollars on minority- and women-owned products and services no matter where they’re sold.

To even buy stock in publicly traded companies that stand firm on DEI. That value us more than the threats of a president with a worthless ego-crypto-meme coin.

On this “Black Wall Street” our dollars — and the dollars of those who believe in the true spirit of diversity, equity and inclusion of all Americans — remain with those among our own who’ve fought through the struggles, and with those who fight with us.

To get it right this time.

Note: The internet is proliferated with posts like this one on from a entrepreneur whose products are sild at Target and this Black-owned business shopping guide.

Let’s be better tomorrow than we are today. My column appears on AL.com, and digital editions of The Birmingham News, Huntsville Times, and Mobile Press-Register. Tell me what you think at [email protected], and follow me at twitter.com/roysj, Instagram @roysj and BlueSky.