Actor Hill Harper is launching a fintech app called The Black Wall Street, named after Tulsa, Oklahoma’s affluent African American community that was burned and destroyed by Whites in 1921.
The app plans to empower investors of Color and will go live on June 1.
The Black Wall Street app will offer a digital wallet for peer-to-peer payment and the ability to trade cryptocurrencies like bitcoin and ethereum.
“What the Black Wall Street was in Tulsa and the Greenwood district is just very empowering. We have to encourage Black ownership, and that’s what we want to do on the platform. We’re starting with a digital wallet and the ability to start to learn financial literacy, create a community, and allow people to invest,” Harper told CNBC. “But the ultimate goal is to create a whole ecosystem, and eventually a marketplace where the recirculation, the circulation of dollars through this digital wallet, allows job creation, business creation, and job growth.”
As part of the app’s launch, The Black Wall Street is planning a 30-city financial literacy tour that begins on April 30 in Los Angeles. The tour plans to stop in Tulsa on May 31, the anniversary of when the original Black Wall Street was destroyed 100 years ago.
“The Good Doctor” actor also hopes the app keeps dollars circulating in the Black community a little longer as we are so eager to spend outside of our communities. He pointed out how Tulsa was self-sufficient and that money stayed in the community longer. The dollar now only remains an average of seven hours in the Black community.
“There were three pillars that created the wealth that was created in the Black Wall Street [in Tulsa], with the first two being institutional ownership and institutional trust by the community. Pillar number three was the movement of money or capital within the ecosystem where dollars changed hands 60 to 100 times within a year before it left that Black community,” added Harper in the interview.
“I truly believe that unless we start owning our own fintech platforms, our own digital wallets, the dollar will leave within six to seven seconds,” the actor and author further commented.
Harper began working with Black web developers last year before the COVID-19 pandemic hit.
