Wealth & Money Quote by Carter G. Woodson

Woodson isn’t lamenting “bad management” so much as diagnosing a rigged feedback loop: economic failure manufactured by psychological sabotage. The line lands like a clinical autopsy of a system that kills Black institutions twice, first through external barriers, then through the internalized lesson that those barriers prove inherent incapacity. His phrasing, “taught that their own pioneers in business cannot function,” turns racism into pedagogy: a curriculum delivered by schools, newspapers, employers, and banks that trains people to distrust the very efforts meant to widen their freedom.

The specific intent is corrective and strategic. Woodson, as the architect of what became Black History Month and a relentless critic of “miseducation,” is warning that institution-building isn’t just a matter of capital; it’s a matter of confidence, narrative, and collective patience. Depositors “withdrew their deposits” not because they were fickle, but because the social environment made withdrawal feel rational, even prudent. If you’ve been told your community’s competence is an illusion, the safest move is to exit early. The tragedy is that the exit helps produce the proof the ideology demanded.

Context matters: early 20th-century Black banking operated under segregation, chronic undercapitalization, discriminatory regulation, and limited access to liquidity. One rumor could trigger a run; one downturn could be fatal. Woodson’s subtext is blunt: white supremacy doesn’t only exclude Black enterprise; it colonizes the imagination of the excluded, turning self-protection into self-sabotage. The sentence reads like a warning label for every marginalized institution asked to survive without margin for error.