📍 "Sarah’s Oil" is a film about one of America’s first Black child millionaires — and a nation that couldn’t imagine a young Black girl controlling her own fortune or future. ⸻ Hey Builders and Happy Saturday! This weekend, make time to see "Sarah’s Oil." It’s inspired by the extraordinary true story of Sarah Rector, born in 1902 in Oklahoma Indian Territory. At just eleven years old, oil was discovered beneath the 160 acres of land she’d been allotted through the federal Dawes Act system — a plot most had dismissed as worthless. Within months, she was earning the modern-day equivalent of hundreds of thousands of dollars each year. Newspapers called her “the richest Black girl in America.” But her story wasn’t just about wealth. It was about control. When Black and Indigenous citizens began acquiring land and resources through these allotments, local courts and state laws devised new tools to manage them. Judges declared many of these landowners — especially minors and people of color — “incompetent” to handle their own assets. White businessmen were appointed as “guardians” to oversee their finances, leases, and royalties, often draining profits before families ever saw them. These guardianship systems, imposed by courts and sanctioned by state law, were meant to control, compensate, and immobilize the economic opportunities of Black and Indigenous families. Wealth became something to supervise, not to scale. 🍿 Watch the official trailer: youtube.com/... ⸻ 📚 How It Worked ▪️ Guardianship gave courts and local elites the right to intercept royalties and oil revenues, often under the pretense of protection. ▪️ Leases and property sales happened without the consent of the rightful owners. ▪️ Bureaucratic rulings of “incompetence” effectively erased economic agency. ▪️ The system converted prosperity into dependency, ensuring that control of capital remained in white hands even when ownership appeared integrated. This was not accidental. It was structural—an early example of how laws and systems were engineered to immobilize mobility. ⸻ 🧱Builder Insights 1️⃣ Wealth without autonomy isn’t advancement; it’s containment. 2️⃣ Systems built under the banner of “protection” often preserve inequality. 3️⃣ Legal design is moral design; every contract encodes a worldview. 4️⃣ The structures that managed Sarah Rector’s fortune echo today—from credit scoring to algorithmic risk models. 5️⃣ Equity means rewriting the architecture of control, not just redistributing access. ⸻ 🎬 Closing Thought A century after Sarah Rector’s oil strike, the same questions surface in startups and venture capital: Who gets to own their ideas? Who sets the terms of trust? And when capital arrives, does it come with freedom or supervision? "Sarah’s Oil" is not just a film about the past — it’s a mirror for our markets. The guardianship model didn’t disappear; it evolved into term sheets, voting rights, and liquid preferences. So this weekend, go see the film. Let it remind you that ownership is still the final frontier of equity — in oilfields, laboratories, or in AI. ⸻ ⚡ OHUBNext Daily Brief — investments, edge tech, and moves that matter. For 12+ years, OHUB has been building pathways to multi-generational wealth through exposure, skills, entrepreneurship, capital markets, and inclusive ecosystems.