Beyond Capital: BADGE Lecture Explores Black Wealth Through August Wilson’s American Century

By Chad Eric Smith, Director of Strategic Communications and Marketing, Chadwick A. Boseman College of Fine Arts

What does it mean to be wealthy?

That question—and the limitations of defining wealth solely through money, property, and financial capital—animated “Black Wealth Across the American Century,” the latest installment of Howard University’s Black Arts, Design & Global Engagement (BADGE) Initiative Lecture Series, presented in partnership with The August Wilson Society on September 30 in the Howard University School of Business Auditorium.

The conversation brought together Dr. LaTanya White, National Associate and Mid-Atlantic Regional Director for the Howard University & PNC National Center for Entrepreneurship, and Dr. Khalid Y. Long, associate dean of academic affairs in the Chadwick A. Boseman College of Fine Arts and president of the August Wilson Society.

Dean Raquel Monroe opened the program by placing the discussion within the broader vision of BADGE, an interdisciplinary Howard University initiative and research hub housed within the Chadwick A. Boseman College of Fine Arts.

Against a presentation asking, “What is BADGE?”, Monroe described the initiative, which she founded in 2026, as a vehicle for advancing Black creative practice, scholarship, and engagement across the African Diaspora. She outlined four interconnected areas of focus: research and scholarship, creative practice, public programming, and diasporic exchange.

The lecture itself demonstrated that interdisciplinary mission in practice, bringing scholarship on entrepreneurship and wealth-building into conversation with one of the most significant dramatic chronicles of Black American life.

Long began with a provocation: August Wilson might have resisted the premise of a conversation about “wealth” if the term were understood only through a capitalist framework.

 

Through Wilson’s work, Long suggested, wealth could also be understood through cultural inheritance, community, spirituality, memory, and agency.

White’s own approach to wealth immediately established common ground. Her Framework for Building Black Dynasties through Dynastic Wealth® similarly expands wealth beyond financial accumulation to encompass the resources, knowledge, relationships, values, and histories that families preserve and transfer across generations.

That early alignment set the stage for a wide-ranging conversation about what Black communities inherit, what they own, what they preserve, and what can be lost when value is measured only in financial terms.

Long situated the discussion within Wilson’s American Century Cycle, the playwright’s ten-play exploration of Black life across each decade of the 20th century. He also emphasized that Wilson did not write the plays chronologically, discussing their order of authorship as a way of tracing the playwright’s own artistic and intellectual development.

 

Several plays offered particularly rich entry points into the afternoon’s questions.

In The Piano Lesson, the economic conflict centers on whether inherited cultural property should be converted into financial capital. Boy Willie wants to sell the family piano to purchase Mississippi land once owned by the Sutter family, viewing landownership as a pathway toward independence and intergenerational wealth.

Berniece, however, understands the piano as something that cannot be reduced to market value. Carved into it is the history of their family, including the memory and sacrifice of their ancestors.

The play therefore raises a question that resonated throughout the conversation: What happens when economic advancement appears to require relinquishing the history that gives that advancement meaning?

Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom shifted the discussion from inheritance to Black artistic labor. Ma Rainey and her musicians create the music from which commercial value is generated, but white producers and recording executives hold much of the institutional power surrounding contracts, recordings, and profits.

Ma understands that imbalance and uses her celebrity as leverage. Levee, by contrast, believes talent, innovation, and ambition can provide a route toward greater independence. His experience reveals the limits of that assumption and exposes a distinction with particular relevance within a College of Fine Arts: creating value is not necessarily the same as owning or controlling it.

The discussion also turned to Jitney, where Wilson examines working-class entrepreneurship through an informal Black transportation business serving Pittsburgh’s Hill District. The station provides employment and meets a community need neglected by conventional taxi services, yet its drivers remain economically vulnerable.

Youngblood’s effort to purchase a home reflects aspirations toward stability and property ownership, while the threatened demolition of the station through redevelopment demonstrates how precarious community-created economic structures can remain when larger institutions possess the power to displace them.

By Radio Golf, Wilson presents a different stage of Black economic life. Its central characters possess capital, professional status, political influence, and access to real estate development. The question is no longer simply whether Black Americans can enter established systems of wealth and power, but what obligations accompany that access.

Harmond Wilks’ plans for redevelopment in the Hill District force him to confront the history embedded in the community he intends to transform. His conflict with business partner Roosevelt Hicks raises another of the afternoon’s central tensions: whether economic advancement can itself reproduce patterns of displacement when separated from history, community, and accountability.

White’s Dynastic Wealth® framework provided a contemporary complement to those questions.

The framework begins with family wealth history, encouraging families to understand how wealth has moved across generations, learn and document their histories, interview elders, and create intentional conversations about inheritance.

From there, White identifies five interconnected forms of wealth: financial wealth, spiritual wealth, wealth of knowledge, intellectual wealth, and relational wealth.

 

Financial wealth includes familiar tools such as investing, insurance, real estate, tax strategy, and business ownership. But her model places those tools alongside family identity and values; accumulated knowledge and lived experience; transferable ideas, skills, and abilities; and the relationships and social capital developed through leadership, entrepreneurship, service, and philanthropy.

The framework ultimately emphasizes continuity through mechanisms including estate planning, trusts, family constitutions, and family retreats.

Taken together, White’s framework and Long’s examination of Wilson challenged attendees to think about a dynasty not simply in terms of how much money one generation leaves another, but in terms of what a family or community successfully preserves and passes forward.

That expansive understanding of wealth continued into a lively audience Q&A.

When one participant suggested that the nuclear family was central to Black wealth-building, Long challenged the premise, arguing that the elevation of the nuclear family as the normative model must also be examined within the history of white supremacy. The exchange generated vigorous but respectful discussion about kinship, family structure, community, economic stability, and the different networks through which wealth can be created and transferred.

The debate was fitting for a program built around interdisciplinary inquiry rather than easy resolution.

 

By bringing an entrepreneurship scholar into conversation with a theatre scholar, “Black Wealth Across the American Century” demonstrated BADGE’s capacity to create dialogue across fields that might otherwise remain separate. White offered a framework for thinking intentionally about what Black families can build, protect, and transfer. Wilson’s plays, through Long’s analysis, revealed the histories, contradictions, and human consequences embedded within those choices.

Together, they offered a definition of wealth that extended well beyond capital.

Wealth could be property and financial security. But it could also be cultural inheritance, knowledge, relationships, spirituality, community, agency, and memory.

And across both scholarship and performance, the afternoon’s conversation returned to the same challenge: how to recognize what has value, protect it, and ensure that something meaningful remains to be passed forward.