Smith College’s Black Students’ Alliance (BSA) hosted its 13th Biennial Conference entitled “Investing In Ourselves: Black Wall Street and Collective Economics” on April 10-11. A reflection upon histories of wealth inequality and racial violence in America, as well as a celebration of Black resilience and ingenuity, the conference is a testament to BSA’s vision for racial justice at Smith and beyond.
The BSA’s Biennial Conference is a massive student-led undertaking, involving months of planning and drawing crowds from across the Five Colleges. This year’s virtual event featured an illustrious array of guest speakers and focused on themes of Black financial literacy, generational wealth and self-determination through finance. Workshops and webinars on both days were well-attended with select evening events streamed live on the Smith College Facebook page.
Highlights included moderated Q&A’s with Lauren Simmons, Wall Street’s youngest and only current Black female stock trader, and Tavonia Evans, founder of $Guap Coin, a cryptocurrency that supports Black-owned businesses, HBCUs and philanthropic organizations.
All of the weekend’s sessions, however, provided productive spaces for Black students to imagine paths toward racial justice and financial freedom through collective economics. This follows what Diamond Mark ‘22, a member of the BSA’s conference organizing committee, called a “financial awakening happening right now within the Black community.” With the pandemic exacerbating the stark Black-white wealth gap and the resurgent Black Lives Matter movement calling for increased resource redistribution and mutual aid, a conversation about financial liberation appears long overdue.
Underscoring further the urgency of the conference’s mission is the lesser-known history of Tulsa’s Black Wall Street, the site of one of the worst incidents of racial violence in the U.S. Almost a century ago to date, a mob of armed white men tore through Tulsa’s Black district of Greenwood, at the time an entirely self-reliant and thriving epicenter of Black business and culture. The effects: hundreds dead, thousands violently displaced, and millions in Black wealth and property destroyed. Despite this devastation, the neighborhood was able to recover and today the Black Wall Street framework has been taken up by many, including BSA, as a model for Black economic progress and resilience.
In designing their conference, BSA both promoted and practiced a number of the model’s core tenets, evident in their choice of speakers, their decision to support Black-owned companies with their door prizes and giveaways, and their ability to draw upon their network at Smith.
“It definitely branched out from something that we were planning to something that involved our entire campus community,” Mark said. The final product was co-sponsored by seven different offices on campus and even featured Smith alum and co-founder of DIFFvelopment Esi Gillo ‘10. These achievements and more highlight that wealth comes not only in dollars but in building a network of community members invested in a shared vision for the future.
Recent and past coverage from The Sophian makes it clear that Smith’s vision for racial justice remains contested. Nevertheless, this kind of forward-thinking insight and emboldened leadership from the BSA should come as no surprise. As Whitley Hadley, Associate Director of Multicultural Affairs, told The Sophian, “BSA is at the forefront of our cultural spaces.” In line with this statement and as a result of the events of last summer, BSA has been collaborating with college administrators like never before to make concrete steps toward racial justice action planning.
“Our Chairs meet with President McCartney and Vice President for Equity and Inclusion Floyd Cheung on a monthly basis to discuss our demands,” Mark told The Sophian. Many of these demands are fifty years old. A living document tracking the college’s progress can be found at the Office of Equity and Inclusion (OEI) homepage. Recommendations from the working group on the required course on race—BSA’s principal demand since 1989—are set to release in June. “We are beyond statements,” Hadley claimed. “There needs to be action plans and there needs to be constant nurturing of that action plan.”
Readers who missed this year’s conference can find more information on historic Black Wall Streets across the country at the padlet here, provided to attendees by guest speaker Ashley Philippsen of IMPACTTulsa. Next year, as the college looks forward to an in-person Fall semester, BSA is set to host a symposium event and the Office of Multicultural Affairs (OMA) is hoping also to reopen the doors to Smith’s cultural spaces. BSA, OMA, and OEI can all be found on Instagram.
(Photo via Smith College Social Network)
