Even today, racial discrimination is still a major disease of American society, even if black people become presidents. Because this kind of discrimination is buried in the bones and is passed down in the blood.
A hundred years ago, white Americans were even more racist by people of color, even with official support, such as the infamous "white bus seat."
In that social context, people of color, especially black people, are almost all poor people at the bottom, and poverty has become a stereotype in them.
Ironically, in 1914, a 12-year-old black girl broke that stereotype. She earns about $300 a day by staying at home and doing nothing, or close to $10,000 a month.
That's ten thousand dollars in 1914, and if you look at purchasing power, $1 at that time is equivalent to $22 today. In other words, the black girl's daily income is $6,600 today, and her annual income is more than $2.4 million!
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="4" why did > a 12-year-old black girl get rich? Oil fields are found under private land</h1>
$2.4 million a year, an income that lasts only two or three years, is enough to turn the black girl into an ordinary rich man. Because of this, when her wealth was exposed, it immediately caused uneasiness and hatred in white American society, and the self-proclaimed noble white people could not tolerate the existence of such a rich black man in the United States.
Then again, what was the black girl capable of making $300 a day? In fact, it is very simple, she earns money by collecting land rent.
In 1902, this name was Sarah. Sarah Rector's black girl was born in Oklahoma, south-central America, and is the descendant of a black slave.
After the End of the Civil War in 1865, American slaves were liberated and became freedmen. In Oklahoma, the state government signed an agreement with former black slaves that their offspring would automatically acquire a 160-acre plot of land when they were born.
160 acres is not small, and with the acres we Chinese used to, it is almost 960 acres. In this way, with this automatically acquired land alone, the black slaves and their descendants could be immediately promoted to large landowners.
What good thing in the world! The Oklahoma government is doing this to collect land taxes. The state has always been sparsely populated, and to this day, only 3.58 million people live on 180,000 square kilometers of land.
The area of almost two Jiangsu provinces is only the size of the population of one prefecture-level city, so the land there is not valuable at all. What's more, the land allocated by the state government to the descendants of black slaves is all barren land in remote areas, which is not only inconvenient for transportation, but also not suitable for cultivation, so many people can only be abandoned there after being allocated to land, and there is no output at all.
This is not the end, you can not plant land, but the annual land tax can not be paid. For 160 acres, at the time, there was about $30 in land taxes, and it was paid every year.
Blacks are already poor, and $30 is a huge amount of money for them, so many blacks become untrustworthy because they can't pay taxes, and eventually lose their land.
It can be seen that the agreement signed between the Oklahoma government and the blacks, on the surface, is to give blacks benefits, but in fact it pushes them into the fire pit, so that their descendants will either carry huge land taxes, or become untrustworthy people and live forever at the bottom of society.
But that's called Sarah. The exception is Rector's girl, who was born 60 miles from home and whose parents cleverly helped her lease it to Standard Oil (the oil giant of the last century).
In this way, the annual rent of the land can offset the land tax, and Sarah can own the land at no cost. The reason why oil companies are willing to lease this barren land is not to do good deeds and do wrongs, but to explore for oil.
No one knows which piece of land has oil under it, so the oil company will deliberately lease a large piece of land before exploration, and after completing the exploration, if there is no oil under this land, it will go to the lease.
Luckily, under Sarah's 160 acres, there's a huge oil field. As soon as the results of the exploration came out, Standard Oil approached her and her family and signed a new agreement with them.
Under the agreement, Standard Oil could exploit the oil under Sarah's land at will, provided that she was paid about $300 a day in rent.
Faced with a sudden wealth, Sarah and her parents were overwhelmed, but no one wanted to live with money, so they happily signed the agreement.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="6" > became the highest taxpayer in the state, and the "noble" white man could not sit still</h1>
After the agreement came into effect, Standard Oil did pay Sarah the rent as required. By the second year, Sarah had become the highest taxpayer in Oklahoma with this rent, and the fact that she immediately shocked white society.
Many whites took to the streets to protest, unable to accept that a black man could be so rich, and strongly demanded that the government solve this "problem." The protests grew louder and louder, and within days they had swept across Oklahoma.
In order to quell the protests, the state government, in conjunction with the state legislature, created a circular according to which Sarah. Rector was no longer a black man, but a "white man" who could enjoy all the powers and status that whites had, such as being able to sit in a "white seat" on a bus, freely entering and leaving the white community, and so on.
What a ridiculous announcement that money can actually "bleach" skin tone! Sarah. Recto's parents were both black and his ancestors were black, but the Oklahoma state government openly "referred to black as white" and insisted that she was a white person. This is not the glory of the black girl Sarah, but the shame of all white people!
Fortunately, a few days later, black people in Oklahoma also came forward to protest, and the state government had to revoke the notice, and Sarah, who had been "white" for a few days, was a "white man" in the past few days. Rector became black again.
After this farce, Sarah. Rector's life also changed completely, she became a celebrity in Oklahoma, and even many white youths came to propose.
But Sarah. Rector didn't like anyone, and she eventually married Robert Campbell, who was also black, and the couple also opened a car company.
Because they were sitting on great wealth, they successfully entered the local high society, and the rich white people had to pinch their noses while interacting with them, and as for the poor white people at the bottom, they only had envy and jealousy.
During the Great Depression, Sarah and her husband's car company, like many businesses of the time, went out of business due to poor management. But sarah's 160-acre plot of land hasn't been tapped yet, so the rent alone is still enough to sustain the family's prosperity.
In 1967, at the age of 65, Sarah. Rector died in silence. Two years before her death, in 1965, the United States enacted the new Electoral Rights Act, which allowed blacks to own votes.
So say that "rich woman" Sarah. Rector is also a black person who has enjoyed the right to vote, and I don't know what will happen to the people who took to the streets to protest and led to the state government declaring her a "white person".