Before the love of my life passed away, he often said: “We are descendants of slaves. This is our house. We made it."

A regular installment about race and money in America, from the authors of "The Black Dollar"

Good morning. 

This is a special edition of the newsletter, written in memory of Ebony’s late partner, Terez Paylor, a sports journalist who passed away one year ago. 

We hope it will provide insight into why Ebony is dedicating so much of her personal time reporting about race and money for this newsletter and for our forthcoming book, “The Black Dollar.”

As always, if you like our newsletter, please share it with your friends and family. If you decide it’s not for you, there’s an unsubscribe button at the bottom.

Now onto this edition. 

An Essay by Ebony.

Dedicated to Terez Paylor

The icy cold and snowy weather in January 2020 couldn’t dampen our spirits, even though it delayed the closing on our home for a couple of days. Finally, after months of watching the builder’s crew finish the basement, my longtime love and I closed on the purchase of our “forever home” in the northern part of Kansas City. 

We rushed over that evening. Terez told me to slow down as we walked up the driveway. He was worried about my right shoulder that had been broken from a fall the year before. Once inside, we ran around, looking in all of the empty rooms. We stood in front of the staircase and took a selfie holding our key and I later posted it on Facebook.

I think about this moment often, partly because we are approaching the one year anniversary of Terez’s unexpected death, but also because I’ve spent much of the last six months reporting about race and money for this newsletter and our book “The Black Dollar.” I’ve been reflecting on my own money experiences as part of a Black couple. 

Terez and I weren’t immediately able to move into our new home. He had to cover another Super Bowl, and I had to travel to Washington for a media organization board meeting. So, a month after we’d taken our selfie and celebrated our culminating adventures together – moves, job changes and spirited household budget meetings – we finally had moving trucks pulling up to our place.  

Terez stood in our foyer right after we moved in, still grateful for our home. He talked about how much he loved the natural light that shone through our front windows. And he said proudly: “We are descendants of slaves. This is our house. We made it.”

My home had become a symbol of struggle, rising and love. 

Neither Terez nor I came from significant money, certainly not from families with generational wealth. We were middle class. We didn’t have trust funds. Nobody in our family had ever talked to us about estate planning. A relative gave me bad advice on how much to save in my 401k when I started my first job. 

Years before the pandemic made remote work common, we developed a plan for me to eventually move to the middle of the country, joining him in Kansas City, and to work remotely. We did this so that we could earn East and West coast salaries but have lower property taxes and lower costs in general. Terez loved Kansas City and had spent 15 years there, covering sports.

Our relationship was young, but we already had financial challenges to deal with. We both had credit card debt when we met. That made us similar to more than 40 percent of Americans, and especially Black Americans. We worked hard together to pay it off. We also had student loan debt like many Black Americans – and we were trying to save money, too. 

We knew our debt would be something we’d have to work on. But the financial history of our country and the practices of banks had more of an impact on our lives than we expected and even really understood.

Years before I would meet Terez, I had purchased my first home – a condo in Cleveland near the West Side Market. That’s an area that had a lot of investment early this century after the city’s economic downturn in the 1990s. My condo was across the street from the historic food market. Anyone who has been to Cleveland has checked out this stunning red-brick building built in 1912 and still filled with food stalls that have been run by the same families for generations. 

Cleveland, like many cities, has a long history of segregation, dating back to the early 1900s when Cleveland was among the more aggressive cities in creating zoning plans. In fact, Cleveland’s 1921 plan was co-authored by Robert H. Whitten, who was also pivotal in New York City’s and Atlanta’s segregation-focused zoning. As Whitten wrote to Atlanta officials, “home neighborhoods had to be protected from any further damage to values resulting from inappropriate uses, including the encroachment of the colored race.”

The result in Cleveland was that most Black residents lived on the East side and most white residents were on the West side. I first lived in a rental apartment on the East side, but I moved to the West side to be closer to work because often I worked into the early morning hours. That’s where I bought my first home, the condo by the West Side Market.

I’ve been thinking more about how race might have played into my real estate deal over the past year as I’ve been reporting on race and money.

In the end, I had to sell my condo because I had moved to Detroit. But by then, the housing market had collapsed. Eventually, I agreed to a version of a short sale — I had a buyer for my home, but the price was below the full amount I owed.

My bank was not willing to negotiate. For three years I had stayed current on the loan while I searched for a buyer. I wasn’t even living in the property then. But the bank would not budge. I’m aware that some banks did wipe out debt during short sales. My bank said if I wanted to sell the home at a loss, I would need to keep paying back the debt for the next 13 years.

I know this is an unbelievable story, but it’s true. 

It’s only in the last week that I made the last installment payment on that home loan. That condo I haven’t owned since 2009 was a debt until now. 

I’ve learned from financial advisors and lawyers who I didn’t have at that time that I should have simply said, “No, I won’t do that” and walked away from the house. I should not have signed a promissory note. The impact on my credit may have been the same, but I was young and afraid. The Cleveland bank charged me 5 percent interest on the remaining original mortgage debt until one day it mysteriously erased the interest with no explanation. I have all of the paperwork, and a lot of questions.

This last installment payment was something Terez and I planned for years to celebrate together. And, so, for many reasons this milestone is bittersweet. 

More than three years after the “short sale,” I earned a Massachusetts real estate license, bought more properties and eventually picked up a real estate license in Missouri and represented us in our Kansas City home purchase. I was determined to make my money back from that horrible experience and to grow my financial and real estate knowledge. I know we were fortunate to get to where we got because so many Black families did not recover from the Great Recession and housing market collapse.

A couple months after Terez’s death last year, I attended a widow’s support group. Afterwards, the leader asked if I had enough money for food, and I told her I was O.K.: Terez and I had plans in case of an emergency. Still, it was a sobering experience. Just a year earlier we’d paid for my grandmother’s groceries and now someone was asking if I needed help.

Now, as I commemorate Terez one year after his passing, I am also reflecting on how I’ve spent the past year. My work on this newsletter and my book have been an important part of it.

For me, this project pulls together my interest in so many areas. I want to contribute to the discourse and share information on race and money. I have a deep interest in Black history as a Black studies minor in college, and I am a former in-person and online instructor of Black press classes for over a decade at Cuyahoga Community College in Cleveland. I have taught for multiple universities as I grew my journalism career.

I know this project is worthwhile, too, because Terez read our proposal, supported it and offered to edit me if I needed him. For both of us, despite missing links in our family trees, we knew from the color of our skin that generations of our families have been tied to the effects of slavery.

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The Latest Highlights. 

A Black Governor for the Federal Reserve Board: There’s been lots of talk about Pres. Biden’s next choice for the board of the Federal Reserve, Lisa Cook, who is a Michigan State University economist who researches how racial inequality and violence hurt economic growth. Berkeley professor of economics Brad DeLong taught Lisa Cook years ago and his newsletter this week features his thoughts on her and a round-up of other economists who support her.

Black-Owned Media: This past week Capital B — a non-profit news outlet owned by Black journalists to cover Black issues — launched. You can check it out here. We read with interest an essay by Sara Lomax-Reese, whose family has owned the Black-focused radio network in Philadelphia called WURD Radio. One of the questions we have been interviewing people about for our book is ownership of companies and why the racial make-up of owners matters. If you have thoughts on that topic, please e-mail us.

And a bit about Louise: If you enjoyed Ebony’s essay this week’s newsletter, you might enjoy a Q&A with Louise last year about growing up near a Black-led town in Florida.

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Thanks for reading. If this was forwarded to you, we hope you will sign up for a free subscription to follow our journey.

-Ebony and Louise