“I mean, what do I have?” he replied from his wheelchair. “If they would tell me to roll out now, they’d take this chair. I’d have to crawl out of the front door. I have nothing; I have nothing."

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

“I can’t wrap my head around this.”

That’s what Ebony said when she called in for our daily catchup on Tuesday. She had just seen the news of a man in Missouri freed after 42 years of a wrongful imprisonment.

“That’s our whole lives, Louise,” she said, “and he gets no money for that? He did nothing wrong, he’s jailed 42 years and he gets nothing? How’s he supposed to go out and have a life? How would he get a job? How would he pay for food?”

We’ll have more on that shocking story later in this e-mail and will explain why state laws don’t always compensate people who are wrongfully jailed.

But, first, Ebony had a Q&A with Louise this week. It’s about tied to why Louise is doing this project. (We will have a similar Q&A with Ebony around the end-of-year holidays.)

The Q&A.

Ebony: We have been reporting for a few months for our book “The Black Dollar,” and often you are the sole white person in the places we go and conversations we have. How does that make you feel?

Louise: It doesn’t strike me much. And I think that’s because of my childhood. I grew up in Maitland, Florida — a small town near Orlando. And my elementary school sat right on the border with Eatonville, the oldest Black town to incorporate (back in 1887). I remember walking from my school around Lake Sybelia just behind it, past the Audubon Center, and into the Eatonville neighborhood. It’s a small place with only a few thousand residents and it’s residents are more than 90 percent Black. It was home to my classmates.

Louise outside of her elementary school, one of the more historically diverse schools in Central Florida.

Ebony: What did that mean in terms of numbers and your experience?

Louise: In the 1980s, when I was a child, Lake Sybelia Elementary School was 65 percent white and 35 percent Black. As The Orlando Sentinel wrote in 1986, it was “a racial mixture that is missing in most Orange County schools.” Several of my teachers were Black and the one who made the strongest impression on me was my fourth grade teacher Marva Taylor, a daughter of sharecroppers and great granddaughter of slaves. I first learned American history from her. She was also the only teacher who called me out for talking too much in school, and she sent me to detention. She was right - I needed to listen more.

Ebony: How much did you know about the history of your town when you were growing up?

Louise: I was in elementary school in the 1980s, at an interesting time. The county was looking at building a highway right through Eatonville. It would have destroyed the small downtown area there. There hadn’t been much national attention at that point on Eatonville, even though the author Zora Neale Hurston grew up there and had set “Their Eyes Were Watching God” there. That highway - the threat of wiping out the heart of Eatonville - brought residents together and they created the annual Hurston festival in 1988 to shine a light on local history. That festival was pivotal in convincing the county to back off and cancel that highway plan.

Ebony: You know, I covered education for The Plain Dealer in Cleveland for years early in my career. There were many views about school integration. It sounds like you think it worked really well at your school.

Louise: I can’t speak for everyone who went to my school and in fact, Hurston herself questioned integration in 1955 when she wrote to The Orlando Sentinel that Brown v. Board of Education was “insulting rather than honoring my race.” More recently, in 2008, The New York Times profiled Eatonville and wrote that “residents now say that the desegregation of schools, while positive in some respects, diluted Eatonville’s cohesiveness and undermined the confidence of its youth.” My classmates are planning a reunion next year, and I’m excited to see them. I will never forget standing on our playground together and watching spaceships go up in the sky. (NASA is on the coast.)

Ebony: If I came to Eatonville today, what would I see?

Louise: It hasn’t had much development, Ebony, and in fact some of its historic buildings are in disrepair. There’s a club there, formerly known as Club Eaton, where musicians like Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holliday performed. It was part of what was called the Chitlin’ Circuit, venues that welcomed Black performers during segregation. I visited over Thanksgiving and that club is boarded up. I’ll put some photos below in this e-mail.

Ebony: How does all this relate to race and money and our project?

Louise: I think more progress will be made in our country around economic inequality and race as people find personal connections to the history of what’s brought us to where we are. Eatonville is my personal connection.

The Latest Highlights.

Things are Getting Better? One of the things we have heard from some people as we talk about our book is the idea that the racial wealth gap has gotten less severe and so why write a book on it? So this report released last week by the National Association of Real Estate Brokers got our attention. It points out that the gap in homeownership rates between white and Black Americans is wider today than it was in 1960.

Medical Debt Gap.. The Numbers Speak for Themselves: There is $140 billion in overdue medical bills in the United States, Bloomberg reported this week, and that medical debt is more prevalent among Black Americans. About 28 percent of Black families have medical debt compared with 17 percent of White households. The story, by John Tozzi, explains how collection practices often aren’t equal.

What will Happen to Kevin Strickland? Apparently we weren’t the only ones shocked when we heard about Strickland, the 62-year-old Black man who is not being compensated after being released from his wrongful 42 years in jail in Missouri. By this weekend, more than $1 million had been raised for him by donors.

In a powerful TV interview last summer from jail, Strickland said that if he was released he would find a cardboard box to “get up under a bridge somewhere.” The reporter, Linsey Davis, asked if he was serious. “I mean, what do I have?” Strickland replied from his wheelchair. “If they would tell me to roll out now, they’d take this chair. I’d have to crawl out of the front door. I have nothing; I have nothing.”

The state of Missouri basically did just that —- rolling him out with nothing in hand. Though the state has a law that pays compensation to wrongfully imprisoned individuals, the law only applies to people who used DNA testing to prove their innocence. And, even then, payouts are limited to $36,500 a year, so it would take many years to recover much of that money. Other states, like neighboring Kansas, have policies that offer more money in lump sums to people who were wrongfully convicted. (Strickland’s payout in Kansas - had he been jailed there - would have been around $2.7 million.) The Kansas City Star has an excellent story explaining all this.

Re-entering society from jail is very challenging and it’s something more than a few families we have met have told us has held their families back.

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Thanks for reading. We hope you’ll forward this e-mail to your friends to spread word of our work.

-Louise and Ebony

Eatonville is one of the poorer areas in the Orlando-Maitland area, despite growing attention in its history over the past few decades.

This is the former Club Eaton, where major musicians like Billie Holliday and Duke Ellington played. It’s now boarded up after being closed seven years ago.

This is a mural on the side of Club Eaton. Most recently before it was closed, it was called Club Koha, which stands for Keeping Our History Alive.

A painting of Zora Neale Hurston on a basketball court in Eatonville.