Trump’s Executive Orders Sparks A Call For Black Wall Street

Nathan Daye, 30, remembers the Ku Klux Klan parading through the streets of his hometown of Roxboro, North Carolina, in 2016 when Donald Trump won his first election. He wasn’t surprised; every few years there would be a caravan of Klan members escorted by law enforcement, but Daye couldn’t help the wave of disappointment that hit him watching police protect bigotry. “It’s still possible to have the hoods riding through our town,” says Daye, who has since moved to the Raleigh-Durham area. 

Within his new city, Daye has encountered the Klan less. These days, between parenting his four-year-old and working as an engineer, he has been finetuning his latest hobby: creating comedic cultural content on TikTok. So when news spread on the app that President Trump signed an executive order lifting the ban on segregated facilities for civil contractors, Daye sprung into action. “They say they’re bringing back segregation and I ain’t too mad at it,” Daye said in a video to his 220,000 followers. “I got a couple lines [jokes] I’ve been waiting to get off!” 

While a Black creator cheering on segregation may seem bizarre in 2025, Trump’s vendetta against diversity, equity, and inclusion policies has triggered a decades-old conversation. In February, the U.S. General Services Administration released a 12-page public memo instructing federal agencies to remove the wording “Prohibition of Segregated Facilities” and “Equal Opportunity” from their contract clauses. While the new order pertains to federal employment law guidelines, the removal of these clauses has folks like Daye thinking: In a nation overrun with systemic racism, would separation from other races — white people in particular — be of benefit to Black communities? Exhausted from the current political landscape, some are calling for modern-day Black Wall Streets, and cities like Tulsa, Oklahoma; Mound Bayou, Mississippi, featured in Sinners; and Kinloch, Missouri are the inspiration. 

The original Black Wall Street 

Throughout the Progressive Era, all-Black communities had been the dream for those living under the heel of American racism. But white society wouldn’t allow it. Infamously, in 1921 in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Black Wall Street had been a separate economy for the Black community, by the Black community. After a local teenager was accused of assaulting a white woman, however, white men massacred its citizens, and burned the neighborhood to the ground in one of the most violent episodes in modern American history. In the century since, it has become a touchstone — shorthand for both the dream of independence, and the violent heel of white supremacy. 

“I believe a Black Wall Street is our only way,” says Joy Williams, the TikToker behind @BreadfruitGaal. In a skit captioned “Finally,” which got more than 60,000 likes, Williams plays between the role of a racist government official making policy for segregation and of Black creators welcoming it. “We gotta get the Blacks back, let’s bring back segregation!” she says mockingly. The video then pans to a celebratory response from Williams. “You said they’re bringing back segregation? Yes!” 

The skit may be sarcastic, but it’s based in truth for Williams. In her eyes, segregation will give the Black community “a chance to come together and be unified,” she tells Rolling Stone. “We need community. We already have the skills to make a Black Wall Street or a Black economic center anywhere we are. It’s just about organizing, which has always been the hardest part.”

Still, it’s more separatism than segregation, according to Khalil Muhammad, a professor of African American Studies and Public Affairs at Princeton University, who doesn’t agree with the logic but understands its roots. “The separatist effort was a voluntary effort of mutual aid and collective action for the protection against the violence of white citizens and the state itself,” he says. “Formal segregation, the kind that Black people have lived with in this country, restricted economic and social mobility and has never been something that Black people voted for.” 

Attempts under Jim Crow 

It’s been a hard road to create Black communities away from oppressors. Take Kinloch. Incorporated in 1948, the town was totally self-sufficient. The city of 10,000 was a paradise for a Black kid like Shirley Taylor, 70, whose sharecropper family moved from a shack in Arkansas to a two-story house in the area in 1956. “Kinloch was our Black Mayberry,” Taylor tells Rolling Stone, referencing the tight-knit town of The Andy Griffith Show. “We had all Black everything. Black mayors, Black council people, Black superintendent of schools, it was Blackity, Black, Black.” 

But the people there were forced to support themselves, without the help of the state. “The communities we were forced into were systemic. Once they allowed us to move in, white people moved away and they made sure we were not given the same resources. Kinloch was the perfect name for the community because we all felt like kinfolk. We didn’t know what we didn’t have until we went outside of the community,” says Taylor. Yet it wouldn’t last long. 

By 1981, the city used eminent domain to take over much of the neighborhood to make way for the St. Louis Lambert Airport. The town that was once a Black utopia would now be paved over into a runway. “It was devastating,” recalls Gerald Flowers, another resident of Kinloch, whose daughter made a documentary about what happened to the city. “A lot of people’s houses were worth way more and they wanted to leave them to their kids and grandkids. They struggled all those years to get a piece of the pie and had to start over.” Kinloch residents were forced into the neighboring city, Ferguson— a previous sundown town—where Michael Brown would later be killed by police in 2014. 

These days, skeptics wonder if the desire for an all-Black economic Mecca is a romanticization. “Jim Crow, which is when you saw most of the Black Wall Streets, was a true concept of, ‘You can segregate us but we will still thrive,’” says Mehrsa Baradaran, a professor at University of California Irvine School of Law and author of The Color of Money and The Quiet Coup: Neoliberalism and the Looting of America. “Unfortunately, many of those Black Wall Streets went down because of violence and resentment from the other community. I get the appeal [for a modern Black Wall Street], there’s enough talent and entrepreneurship, but is it possible to financially withdraw from the American economy in a way that would keep the dollars inside the community and for the community alone? Unfortunately not.” 

Modern movements 

There have been attempts to create Black Wall Streets, since the days of Jim Crow, the most recent try was last November, spearheaded by Aniya Holloway. “I’ve always had a longing for community,” says Holloway, 22, who runs her own digital media company, Kultre Media. After Donald Trump won the election, Holloway had the idea to design a program where Black folks could invest their money in a “community financial pot” — essentially centralized stock, where value could increase and allocate to larger projects, like Black-owned grocery stores. “I wanted to build a Black-owned business directory application,” says Holloway. “It was going to be the same way we do Doordash and UberEats. I wanted to integrate a shopping feed for Black-owned businesses in the e-commerce space, to really innovate what it meant to shop Black.”  

Holloway rallied developers and volunteers, raising over $120,000, most of which she maintains went to project development. But after realizing she needed significantly more funding, she had the idea to create a cryptocurrency, a literal “Black dollar,” for Black consumers called, Kyn. “The objective of Kyn was to help us get to our initial funding goals but to also create a currency that we as a community could hold together,” says Holloway. “We wanted to integrate Kyn into the directory, so we’d have our own currency to shop amongst one another’s businesses, unifying us economically. But that didn’t work out.” 

The proposal of Black Project 2025 brought enthusiasm to those made more vulnerable by the election. But by the January soft-launch of Kyn, the space quickly spiraled and participants became distrusting, accusing Holloway of having launched the cryptocurrency as a scam and misappropriating funds, claims which she denies. Black Project 2025 is now dismantled and according to Holloway those who have requested refunds for their donations have received them, and by Juneteenth, any further requests for returns of investments will be completed. “Kyn was the greatest idea I’ve actually ever come up with,” says Holloway. “The utility of Kyn would have been so powerful for our community.”  

A path forward 

The way forward is complicated. Baradaran is against the so-called “Booker T. Washington Myth,” that pulling resources together will create an autonomous Black community. From her research, it comes down to governmental justice and political equality. “All wealth is law,” she says. “The effort at escaping [racism] through a Black Wall Street triggers resentment [from white supremacists]. You get Black Wall Street being bombed or Black men who own property getting lynched by a mob and no ability to fight it in court and get justice. You can’t separate economics from law making, and politics from power. You can’t gain enough wealth to escape it.”

Some, like Muhammad, believe that Black people need to join or build a grassroots, independent political party. Others like Williams, Taylor, and Holloway are simply calling the Black community to support its own. “There’s a lot of animosity and people don’t realize we are all experiencing the same thing, living in the same place, and it’s done on purpose,” says Wiliams. “If segregation came back, it would be a good and bad thing, but we will eventually understand community and go back to the ways we were.” The question is whether the rest of American society would allow it to prosper. “If the powers that be had left us alone,” says Flowers, “we would have fared well regardless.”