Might 23, 2025
Black Detroit leaders are honoring the legacy of historic Black enterprise districts
Black Leaders Detroit is main a 1,645-mile journey from Tulsa’s Black Wall Road to New York Metropolis’s Wall Road, honoring the legacy of historic Black enterprise districts whereas elevating funds to assist Black entrepreneurs.
“We’re driving from Black Wall Road in honor of the legacy of Greenwood,” Dwan Dandridge, founder and CEO of Black Leaders Detroit, instructed BridgeDetroit. “And we’re going to Wall Road as a result of it’s one other place the place Black folks had an enormous hand in creating the wealth… but in addition not having the ability to profit from the wealth that the labor created.”
The fifth annual “Journey for Fairness” kicks off Might 31, making stops in Missouri, Indiana, Ohio, and Pennsylvania earlier than wrapping up round July 4 on Wall Road, America’s monetary epicenter. The journey raises consciousness for Black Leaders Detroit’s mission to fund Black-owned companies, honoring the legacy of Detroit’s historic Paradise Valley and Black Backside neighborhoods, which have been demolished within the Nineteen Sixties to construct I-375, displacing tens of 1000’s of Black residents.
This yr’s Journey for Fairness pays tribute to Black Wall Road, the thriving Black enterprise hub established within the early 1900s in Tulsa’s Greenwood District. That city’s prosperity was violently disrupted on Might 31, 1921, when white mobs looted and burned houses and companies, devastating the group that’s nonetheless making an attempt to rebuild right this moment.
Now a worldwide monetary heart, Wall Road was as soon as the situation of New York’s slave auctions. Main establishments like JPMorgan Chase and New York Life have documented ties to slavery, having profited by utilizing enslaved folks as collateral and insuring them as property.
By means of its annual Journey for Fairness, Black Leaders Detroit organizes a long-distance bike journey alongside citywide occasions designed to unite communities in significant dialogue, reflection, and collective motion for lasting change.
“We invite folks to return out and have a dialog about unity, race, fairness, and what it means to be good neighbors to one another regardless of our variations,” Dandridge mentioned.
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