A village, rebuilt.

The reference point.

In 1921, the Greenwood District of Tulsa, Oklahoma — known as Black Wall Street — was home to more than 300 Black-owned businesses, thirty-six square blocks of banks, schools, law offices, hotels, and professional practices. Over two days in May and June of that year, a white mob, with support from local police and the Oklahoma National Guard, burned it to the ground. Thousands were displaced. Hundreds were killed. The economic infrastructure of an entire community was erased in forty-eight hours.

Greenwood was not the only one. Wilmington, 1898. East St. Louis, 1917. Rosewood, 1923. Tulsa was the most famous, but it was part of a pattern. Thriving Black commercial centers were, throughout American history, systematically destroyed — and the capital that would have compounded across generations was never allowed to accumulate.

A hundred years later, the descendants of those communities are trying to build again. And they are building on digital infrastructure — LinkedIn, Twitter, Substack, Instagram — owned by companies with no obligation to the communities they serve, optimized by algorithms none of those communities had a say in designing, and sold to the highest bidder whenever the growth curve flattens.

NewBWS is what it looks like to build the infrastructure ourselves, on our own terms, this time.

The founder.

NewBWS was founded by Rasheid Scarlett — a technologist and strategist based in Miami, Florida. He is the CEO and founder of NetAesthetics, a consultancy that helps institutions implement artificial intelligence responsibly. He currently serves on the board of the FirstNet Authority in a Special Government Employee capacity.

The idea for NewBWS came out of years of watching Black professional communities coalesce around digital platforms that were never designed to hold them — Fishbowl, Clubhouse, Elpha, The Wing — each of which attracted passionate membership, grew, and then either folded, pivoted, or was acquired into irrelevance. The pattern was never that the communities were the problem. The pattern was that platform-side economics — free-to-use, ad-supported, venture- funded, exit-optimized — were incompatible with long-term community stewardship.

Scarlett began building NewBWS in late 2025 and is launching the Wefunder community-investment campaign on Juneteenth 2026 — the holiday commemorating the emancipation of enslaved Black Americans — as a deliberate act of historical framing. The platform is structured to make it structurally impossible for the communities it serves to be displaced from ownership over time.

The structure.

NewBWS is incorporated as a Delaware Public Benefit Corporation with a golden-share LLC structure. The PBC framework legally obligates the company to pursue its stated public benefit — building digital infrastructure for the Black capital ecosystem — in balance with, not subordinate to, shareholder returns. The golden-share LLC holds an irrevocable veto over any attempt to sell the company, pivot away from its mission, or dilute member governance.

Capital is being raised through a Wefunder Regulation CF campaign — community investment by non-accredited and accredited members alike, structured as a SAFE with profit-sharing dividends. The company has no venture capital, will not accept venture capital, and does not run behavioral advertising on any of its surfaces.

What the platform does.

NewBWS launches across four integrated pillars. The Network is a member-only professional network for founders, investors, fund managers, operators, and institutions across the Black investment ecosystem. The Village Directory is a public-facing verified directory of Black-owned businesses — consumer-accessible, not gated. The Academy is the educational institution at the heart of the platform, with four tracks in development: Personal Finance, Entrepreneurship, Investing, and AI Literacy. Village Commerce is a B2B procurement layer designed to help member businesses find and contract with each other — the dollar- circulation infrastructure that Greenwood had, and that most Black communities have not had access to since.

The timeline.

The Wefunder community-investment campaign opens on Juneteenth 2026 at 9:00 AM Eastern Time. A founding member class of 500 investors and anchor members will be seated between Juneteenth 2026 and Labor Day 2026. Private beta cohorts for the network and The Academy will run through the balance of 2026. Public platform launch is targeted for Black History Month 2027.

The conviction.

Behind the product decisions is a thesis that matters. The Black investment ecosystem is large — roughly $253 billion in assets under management, investment capacity, and deployable capital across Black fund managers, LPs, angels, family offices, and institutional allocators. It is well-networked within itself and poorly networked to the resources, deal flow, and educational infrastructure that exists to serve it. There is enough capital. There has never been enough infrastructure built to hold it, compound it, and circulate it in community.

The answer, this time, is to build the infrastructure ourselves — and to make it impossible to sell.