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This article uses the records of the National Negro Business League (NNBL) to examine the economic life and experiences of African American entrepreneurs between 1900 and 1920. Often referred to as the 'golden age' of Black business, this era saw the proliferation of African American owned businesses, despite the increase in discrimination and racial persecution that had characterized the United States since the turn of the century. Far from merely a platform to reaffirm the ideology of its founder Booker T. Washington, the League enabled a diverse group of business owners, entrepreneurs and professional men and women to exchange ideas and help one another navigate the segregated and uneven infrastructures of American capitalism. The protocols of the League's annual conventions offer a window into the world of Black proprietors and shopkeepers. Specifically, the personal accounts delivered at these events reveal the experimental commercial sphere that existed next to the well-established trade and business institutions of corporate capitalism. They also demonstrate that the members of the NNBL were a progressive force: they confounded gender norms by carving a place for women within the formal Black business establishment and they diversified the economic playing field by charting alternative narratives of business success. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the African American business history of Koinonia Farm in Georgia during the civil rights era in the mid-20th century. Topics discussed include the significant contribution of African American financial services providers such as banker John Hervey Wheeler to the civil rights movement, the impact of economic resistance and violence to the financial records of Koinonia Farm, and the racial reconciliation initiatives launched at Koinonia Farm in 1955.

The article presents a history of the National Negro Business League (NNBL) in the New York state in the 20th century. Also cited are Booker T. Washington's founding of NNBL in 1900 to promote business development among African Americans, and Washington's cooperation with friends like T. Thomas Fortune and Emmett J. Scott to organize African American entrepreneurs.

This article presents the formal and material innovations of The Underground Rail Road (1872) and its author and publisher, William Still. Before the Civil War, Still chaired the Philadelphia Vigilance Committee, which assisted hundreds of fugitives from slavery in making their way to freedom. After the Civil War, Still wrote a book based on his records of their stories. The discrimination Black writers and readers experienced from the publishing business convinced Still to start his own. Still's publishing business, like the movement his book documented, was the work of a collective. He called on family members, allies in reform, and friends in Black periodical publishing to produce and distribute the book. Still promoted the book and the business as an extension of the liberation movement. The labors of the fugitives he had helped, and of the booksellers he employed, would stimulate the economic progress, and protect the political and social gains, for which African Americans were striving. Still, a race man and a businessman, proposed a solution to the inequitable production and distribution of Black books. "The time has come," he declared, "for colored men to be writing books & selling them too." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Entrepreneurship could level the playing field between racial groups and decrease poverty through job creation. Growth in the U.S. professional services (PS) sector over the last several decades has increased high-wage employment and entrepreneurship opportunities. Although the number of Black-owned PS businesses has grown, their performance lags behind their counterparts of other races. Black entrepreneurs in highly skilled sectors, such as PS, tend to be more educated, better financed, and have more diverse customer bases than their counterparts in other sectors. Yet, these advancements have not translated into firm performance. This study examines factors influencing outcomes of Black PS entrepreneurs in Chicago using interview and focus group data. Results indicate that racialized barriers, current entrepreneurship culture, and the nature of the PS sector combine to contour a contentious business environment. Updating models of inclusion to address the contemporary entrepreneurial environment and incorporating accountability measures are necessary steps to realize the potential of this group. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the history of African American cooperative business ownership and documents the acts of sabotage and terrorism against African American co-ops. It cites the case for reparations as restitution for these attacks and explore the ways reparations in the form of monetary compensation can be used to develop literacy in cooperative economics. It cites the book "Collective Courage: A History of African American Cooperative Economic Thought and Practice."

Entrepreneurship is often touted as an economic opportunity that embodies American ideals of individualism and financial gain. Yet social scientists have long noted divergent entrepreneurial outcomes among various groups. In this paper, we consider how race informs entrepreneurship for minority business owners. In particular, we focus on the ways black entrepreneurs use racial counterframes as a means of defining various aspects of the entrepreneurial experience. Furthermore, we introduce the concept of intersectional counterframes to show how black entrepreneurs understand business ownership as a response to categories that interact with not only to race, but other social group categories as well, such as gender. We argue here that these business owners use both counterframes to construct entrepreneurship not simply as a potential pathway to economic stability, but perhaps more importantly, as a response to existing inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article suggests that the 1830 appearance of Bostonian and African-American businessman Frederick Brinsley in Park Street Church as sole Black worshipper in its main sanctuary, where he legally owned pew 82, was an act of protest coordinated by black civil rights group Massachusetts General Colored Association (MGCA). Topics covered include his exclusion from the church, pew segregation, racism, abolitionist movement, American Colonization Society (ACS), and previous pew owner Henry Farnam.

The 1977 Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) established a bold agenda requiring financial institutions in the USA to serve the credit needs of low- and moderate-income areas, including traditionally excluded minority residential areas. Initially opposed by both bankers and the federal regulatory authorities responsible for enforcement, the CRA has been contentious for decades. This study explores CRA impacts by investigating whether small businesses located in minority neighbourhoods have the same degree of bank-loan access as equally creditworthy firms located in other environs. We analysed both the unmet credit needs of small firms and the outcomes of their loan applications. We found that equality in loan access has been attained in some respects, indicating the CRA has had positive effects on loan availability. Inequality nonetheless persists. Regarding unmet credit needs, firms are penalised if their owners are African American, Latino or Asian American. Since roughly half of owners in minority communities are minorities, our challenge was to disentangle the effects on loan access of small-business geographic location versus owner race. Causal factors underlying our findings were investigated. Did bank regulators take the initiative in lessening traditional discriminatory lending practices? Alternatively, were activist community groups responsible? While the agenda advocated by activist groups coincides closely with actual gains, the overlapping but differing stated objectives of regulators did not. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

During the post-Reconstruction era in the United States, white southerners marked the cultural landscape with monuments and memorials honoring the Confederate cause and its heroes. These racialized symbols enjoyed an undisputed claim to public squares and parks throughout the South. It was not until the late twentieth century that commemorations to the black freedom struggle were publicly supported. This analysis examines the institutionalization of counter-memories of the civil rights movement in Memphis, Tennessee at the Lorraine Motel, the site of the assassination of Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The author draws on collective memory, cultural trauma, and social movements research as well as critical race theory to explain the creation of the National Civil Rights Museum. Using primary and secondary data sources the author examines how social memory agents, a changing political culture, and the passage of time mediated the cultural trauma of King's assassination and influenced the institutionalization of oppositional collective memories. Relying on Derrick Bell's interest-convergence principle, the author concludes that the creation of this major memorial museum was a result of the convergence of white and black interests, specifically the economic and political interests of white elites and the cultural and political interests of black symbolic entrepreneurs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A biography is presented for William Johnson, a black businessman living in Natchez, Mississippi during the antebellum period of slavery in the southern U.S. Topics discussed include his time spent as a barber, his skills as a musician, and relations between blacks and whites in the south during this period of U.S. history. The relatively high social class that Johnson belonged to is also examined.

In this article, the author examines the transition from ethnic enclave to diaspora/transnational entrepreneurship by Black African ethnic entrepreneurs in the United Kingdom through interview/case study approaches. Key issues at stake are whether diaspora/transnational entrepreneurship is a kind of adaptive process in self-actualization, economic empowerment, or competitive advantage or a strategy of reintegration with the country of origin. Leveraging duality of opportunities results in subjective successful business performance and personal contentment of the diaspora entrepreneurs. Transnational entrepreneurship is crucial to business growth in Africa. This is particularly true with diaspora transfers to Africa playing a significant role in social, economic, and business developments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Commentators on African American life have often focused on poverty, evaded recognition of African American wealth, and ignored the ways genteel affluence and impoverishment were constructed along turn-of-the-century color lines. Documentary research and archaeology at the Madam C.J. Walker home in Indianapolis, Indiana, illuminates how the continuum of wealth and poverty was defined and negotiated by one of African America's wealthiest early-20th-century entrepreneurs. The project provides an opportunity to compare the ways in which wealth was defined and experienced along the color line in the early 20th century, and how such notions of black affluence shaped racialized definitions of poverty and materiality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the life of African American abolitionist, ex-slave, and laundry-business owner Cynthia Hesdra. The author is more broadly interested in explaining the contributions of African Americans to the economy of Rockland County, New York as well as the presence of slavery in the state. In this sense, the author is also interested in the relationship between free and enslaved African Americans in New York. More specifically, the article analyzes the legal battle over Hesdra's fortune that occurred after her death, which resulted from a possibly inauthentic will.

The article discusses the efforts of economist Robinson Newcomb (1901-1980) to study African American business enterprises in the U.S. South in the 1920s, and the resistance he encountered from white academics and civic leaders. Newcomb's work at the Institute for Research in Social Science at the University of North Carolina is discussed, as is the destruction of his research on black businesses in Winston-Salem, North Carolina and elsewhere. An appendix reprints Newcomb's surviving accounts of two Southern black businessmen, Moses Amos (1866-1928) and Charles Henry Jones (1873-1945).

Abstract: This study analyzes the occupations of black Americans who have been nationally recognized for their business achievements. Data from renowned encyclopedic sources of biographical information show that occupational niches that arose because of racial segregation and limited opportunities for blacks to participate in the economic mainstream, such as personal services and undertaking, are no longer important routes into the “black business elite.” Yet, these data also suggest that, during the 20th century, entertainment, beauty products, and advertising became major pathways into this elite because of an opportunity structure that promoted blacks’ participation in these occupational niches yet restricted it in others, notably, in construction and manufacturing. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

ABSTRACT: Are historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) a route into the "black business elite," defined as those blacks who have been nationally recognized as successful entrepreneurs? To address this question, the present study analyzes data from authoritative encyclopedic sources on the history of black entrepreneurship in America. The findings suggest that HBCUs have a venerable tradition of contributing to the membership of the business elite, especially in the South, and that such institutions continue to be pathways into this select group of entrepreneurs, along with prestigious historically white colleges and universities in the North. By documenting the important role of HBCUs in the creation of an upper stratum of black entrepreneurs, this study adds a new dimension to literature that shows that HBCUs have produced a leadership class that has been instrumental to the social and economic progress of blacks as a group. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study obtained Black business owners' experiences in Milwaukee. Wisconsin, via qualitative methods, The same issues (racism, loan denial, etc.) that quantitative analyses of Black businesses found existed in this study, However, this study's findings departed from previous Black business studies by providing insights into the human side of Black business owners by allowing them to provide insights into their daily challenges (inability to work with other Black businesses and lack of support from African American customers). And it found that Milwaukee's Black business owners were pessimistic about Black business opportunities over time and relative to African American businesses in other cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents information on a study which examined the impact of economic culture and social capital in the business success of African American entrepreneurs in Cleveland, Ohio. Literature review; Development of research design; Findings; Conclusion and recommendations.

Discusses the role of African-American businesspeople in building economic ties with Africa and the Caribbean. Importance of concern in foreign policy; Investment potential of Africa; Support to efforts by TransAfrica Forum; Concerns with South Africa.