Famed actor Hill Harper is getting into the money game by way of financial technology that’s powering a newly-launched digital wallet for investors of color.
According to a press release, Harper announced the launch of The Black Wall Street app just in time for Financial Literacy Month as a means to empower Black and Latinx investors and contribute to closing the racial wealth gap in America. This feat marks the first-ever Black-owned digital wallet and cryptocurrency exchange platform to exist in the U.S.
Through this digital fintech platform, Harper hopes to create the world’s largest investment and financial literacy curriculum/toolkit for communities of color to use across the diaspora.
“Our technology seeks to replicate the brick and mortar Black Wall Street, as a digital ecosystem that will galvanize the financially excluded and directly stimulate the economic growth and spending in marginalized communities everywhere,” Harper shares in a statement. “With the Black Wall Street technology, we seek to make obsolete payday lenders and other financial predators plaguing our communities, while simultaneously creating cross generational wealth transfer, for people who have historically been taught to work for our wages instead of making our wages work for us…because Black Cash Matters.”
The Black Wall Street app is both named after and inspired by the legacy of the Greenwood district in Tulsa, Oklahoma that was once considered the epicenter of thriving Black businesses.
Next month, the new digital platform will acknowledge the 100-year anniversary of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre with a monumental, 30-market financial literacy campaign and bus tour starting in Los Angeles, CA and ending on Greenwood Avenue in Tulsa, OK from May 31 to June 1.
The tour will visit some of the most disenfranchised communities across the country and introduce financial literacy as well as cryptocurrency in an effort to celebrate the Greenwood legacy, which is considered the most successful Black economic community in U.S. history.
“What the Black Wall Street was in Tulsa and the Greenwood district is just very empowering,” Harper told CNBC. “There were three pillars that created the wealth that was created in the Black Wall Street [in Tulsa],” he notes 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,” he adds.
The Black Wall Street’s Crypto-curriculum and DigitalWallet campaigns will be led by Harper in partnership with world-leading cryptocurrency exchange expert, Najah Roberts.
The ultimate goal of The Black Wall Street is to offer Black and Brown communities a fighting chance to get involved in the transfer of wealth through cryptocurrency and decentralized finance.
The time for communities of color to regain their financial independence is now and Harper hopes to use his new platform to pave the way for better financial futures for generations to come.
For more information about The Black Wall Street, visit its website.