From Black Wall Street to the Story of O.J.

Lori Latrice Martin is Professor and Associate Dean at Louisiana State University. She is author of America in Denial: How Race-Fair Policies Reinforce Racial Inequality in America, also by SUNY Press.

• AcknowledgmentsIntroduction1. Racial Wealth Inequality in America2. Black Tulsa Before the Massacre: The Way We Never Were3. E. Franklin Frazier and the Black Bourgeoise: Revisited4. The Story of O. J.5. Building Black WealthConclusionBibliographyIndex

"Refusing to make Simpson into either saint or sinner, Martin engages O.J.'s infamy as both an object lesson and entrée into a larger analysis of the stormy relationship between Blackness and wealth, all within the raging tempest of an American apartheid. A whirlwind tour from 'Black Wall Street' in the '20s, reactions against E. Franklin Frazier’s Black Bourgeoise in the '50s, to Jay-Z's 2020 viral song 'The Story of O.J.', Martin provides an empirical shelter from the downpour of pathological narratives of Black dysfunction and one-sided tales of Black homogeneity. Out of the fog of raced and classed mythologies, Martin shines a light on the complexities, contradictions, and creations of Black wealth. The Story of O.J. thus stands as a rich almanac that not only provocatively recasts the paleoclimate of race and class in new perspectives, but forecasts both clear and blustery conditions to befall us still." — Matthew W. Hughey coauthor of Racialized Media: The Design, Delivery, and Decoding of Race and Ethnicity.