The student loan debt crisis has been a central focus of the Biden Administration, and with good reason. Americans’ collective student loan debt is second only to our outstanding mortgage debt. But as researchers and commentators have pointed out, that debt load is proportionally higher among women and Black people, adding more financial stress to the lives of folks who already have lower incomes and net worth compared with their white male peers. Because of these factors, student loan debt exacerbates inequalities in American society, including racial inequality.
While college loan debt is defined as a 21st century problem, history shows us that debt has long been used intentionally to reinforce racial, gendered, and economic hierarchies. A prime example is the jail system in pre-Civil War Richmond, Va., where limiting public funding for jails shifted the financial burden of incarceration from the state onto Black Richmonders, reducing some free members of that community to virtual enslavement.
Read More: Biden’s Student Loan Forgiveness Plan Doesn’t Do Enough for Black Americans
Two decades before the Civil War, Richmond was a small but growing city in the Upper South. Richmond served as a center for commerce, a transportation hub. A busy iron foundry produced the rails that built Virginia’s early railroads. Tobacco and wheat flowed in from the hinterland for processing. Tragically, Richmond was also the northern hub of the domestic slave trade, which devastated communities and destroyed families to provide the enslaved labor for the growing cotton economy of the Deep South. In this Second Middle Passage, slave traders drove coffles of enslaved people to Richmond, from which they would be sold and transported south.
Richmond’s resulting bustling economy attracted rural whites, Irish and German immigrants, and Northern merchants. Free Blacks also made their way to the city where, despite its prominence as a slave market second only to New Orleans, Richmond…
