By Lynn Parramore, Senior Research Analyst at the Institute for New Economic Thinking. Originally published at the Institute for New Economic Thinking website
As America remembers the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on the anniversary of his assassination, headlines celebrate the heroic ministers and activists who advanced civil rights in the United States, sometimes at the cost of their lives. But Louis Ferleger, Professor of History at Boston University and a granteeof the Institute for New Economic Thinking, along with Matthew Lavallee, a graduate student at Boston University, have focused their attention on a powerful, behind-the-scenes networkwithout which King and other civil rights leaders could not have succeeded.
Lynn Parramore: You point to an amazing set of facts in your research that would surprise many people. Despite the horrors of Jim Crow, America had 70,000 black-owned businesses in 1920, and over twice that many by 1969. They must have been extremely tough and resourceful to do what they did given the obstacles. Let’s talk about who they were and what kinds of businesses were they running.
Louis Ferleger: When African Americans left sharecropping in the South as the national railroads expanded and allowed them to leave, they moved to metropolitan areas like Boston and Philadelphia. The key is that they weren’t just looking for jobs as domestics or other low-paid work. They were also looking to start their own businesses. They weren’t out to replicate the experience of being sharecroppers, but to establish themselves in other ways. So they started these small businesses, which served African Americans almost uniformly, allowing black communities to thrive and grow. It’s a story that people are not aware of. Their businesses grew even during the Great Depression. Sadly, we don’t have a lot of information on them, but we know that they were grocery stores, hair salons, small variety stores selling everything from hardware to food, gasoline stations, and funeral homes.
LP: Businesses like restaurants or salons are also meeting places. That would be critical for political engagement and mobilization, right?
LF: Exactly. And there’s a lot more activity in support of this than people realize. My hunch is that there are critical discussions at these restaurants and other places about what’s going to happen when Rosa Park does what she does refusing to give up her seat on the bus in Montgomery, Alabama in 1955. That takes nothing away from her in making that decision, but the African Americans in Montgomery were more prepared for what was about to happen than people realize.
In our research we asked, how do you lay the groundwork for the Civil Rights Movement by turning to the one community within these metropolitan areas that has been able to survive the most harsh and adversarial conditions imaginable?
Black businesses become critical as a source of support, but much more importantly, in my mind, as a basis upon which activists could turn to for people who knew how to organize. The business people were entrepreneurial. The capital is self-generated or comes from the small number of black banks. Even though the black banks represented a small amount of capital, it allows business owners to expand when they could. Black insurance companies and banks were established and became successful because there were no alternatives. In Mississippi, when they cut off the access to white banks, African American business owners who were supporting civil rights in various forms turned to black insurance companies and banks outside the state. Martin Luther King made that happen. He visited many of these banks personally.
LP: Let’s talk about the violence that these business owners faced. As a North Carolinian, I’m thinking all the way back to the Wilmington massacre of 1898, a coup d’étatin which the white Conservative Democratic Party led a mob to overthrow the local Fusionist government, which included black Republicans. In addition to slaughtering as many as 300 people, they destroyed black businesses, including the only black newspaper in the city. How do people continue to run businesses with that kind of threat?
LF: When the Civil Rights Movement turns violent, it’s not just towards demonstrators and others, it’s toward these black businesses. You ask the right question, and all I can say is that African Americans have a long and important set of histories in terms of family and kinship relationships that supported these businesses, from barber shops to beauty salons to service stations.
In a table in our paper, we took a pamphlet from Washington, D.C. and put down all the different kinds of stores that African Americans owned there in 1965. That year, seven percent of all the businesses were black-owned. You could go to African American stores for all of your needs: insurance companies, banks, caterers, beauty schools, variety shops, radio and TV stores. It gives you a sense of how these communities were thriving in these places, and that’s how they were able, in my view, to remain viable. I would argue that these black businesses are the training ground for future activists. They taught activists the need to be organized and be prepared.
LP: Tell me about one of the most significant cases in which black business owners provided the kind of support you’re describing.
LF: I think the most important case is the 1955 bus boycott of Montgomery, when African Americans refused to ride buses to protest segregated seating. When they started to boycott the buses, a large network of black-owned taxi companies provided the initial transportation solution. The black businesses were invaluable. Martin Luther King knew that, and he relied the support of small businesses during this long protest — not just the taxis, but the gasoline station owners that are providing gas, the automotive companies that are repairing the taxis. These businesses generated funds across the board to help defray the cost of the boycott. Without them, there is no boycott. There is no success.
LP: Let’s talk about female black business owners. How were they involved in supporting civil rights? This seems to be an especially overlooked area.
LF: It’s true. What’s often missing from the literature is all the black women entrepreneurs who provided the networks of food, who provided clothing when the clothing of protesters was ripped or stolen. Black women were a key part of the black business community. In 1965, there were 295 beauty salons in Washington, D.C., which were overwhelmingly owned by black women. For comparison, there were 180 barbershops owned by black men, but there were many more beauty salons.
NPR [National Public Radio] did a storyon Georgia Gilmore, a Montgomery cook and activist who provided food and funding for the civil rights movement. During the bus boycott, she sold sandwiches and meals to the African Americans involved in the protest, then put the profits back into the movement and helped to support the alternative transportation system. Her house was a meeting place for King.
LP: How do you see black businesses interacting with political causes and civil rights today?
LF: I see black businesses as the nearly invisible cadre of activists that people take for granted. They organize lots of things that happen in lots of cities. They’re often quiet, and they make contributions, and they are trying to keep themselves afloat while simultaneously being much more socially aware and politically astute than people realize. I have a hunch that when journalists look into the story of the surprising 2017 Alabama senate race, when the white Democratic candidate Doug Jones beat Republican Roy Moore, this extreme person, they’re going to find a whole network of black business owners who were supportive in helping and providing funds for the Democratic Party to go door to door to get people to register for that particular election.
LP: Right now, as the country is reflecting on the legacy of MLK and the Civil Rights Movement, why don’t we hear more about the crucial role played by these entrepreneurs? Is there some unease with the idea of black capitalists and small businesses?
LF: I’ve been combing a hundred different sources in terms of newspaper articles all across the country and it’s very frustrating to see that these stories not appearing. We know the names of the celebrities, but nobody knows the names of the taxi drivers that made things like the Montgomery boycott possible. The women who prepared the food. The farmers who donated it. All the small business involved.
I think you’re right that there is a kind of unease. Some historians have dismissed black entrepreneurs because they want African Americans to move into large-scale enterprises, where upward mobility and a better standard of living exist. But people don’t understand that for decades African Americans survived in growing metropolitan areas by owning small businesses, not just by doing domestic work or odds-and-ends jobs. Their importance to Martin Luther King is tremendous. He traveled extensively and met black business owners everywhere. He relied upon them. They gave small contributions of money and provided support in very important places, which made his travel and his role possible.
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Don’t forget the masseuses. I met a skilled confident AA masseuse on a plane out of Birmingham once in those days. At the time, I was in college and had just learned that there was a such an occupation. Probably my mother could have used a masseuse instead of the B12 shots she got from the nurse down the street.
Some historians have dismissed black entrepreneurs because they want African Americans to move into large-scale enterprises, where upward mobility and a better standard of living exist.
Large scale enterprises – like BET?
Let’s say that McDonald’s, which advertises aggressively toward blacks, were managed at its upper reaches solely by black professionals (which it may, for all I know.) What measure of justice has been obtained?
Yes. It is important to note that by definition none of these businesses had shareholders in the public sense. I have mentioned in the past the idea that limited liability allows public ownership of businesses and the stock market itself. Take away those and you have businesses with true owners who have to care about it running well, but also as a corollary businesses that can do much more easily the bidding of its private owners, for bad or, in this case, good.
I found an extraordinary quote at the Angry Bear blog yesterday;
Remarkable that so few words contain such a rich explanation of the situation we face as a nation.
The take away from these two closely related posts is IMHO, is that the understanding of the necessity for solidarity in the face of oppression is felt much more acutely in the Black community than by working class whites.
The myth of the ‘rugged individual’, among other techniques, has been used to convince us that our problems are ours alone, and that we alone are responsible for our economic well-being.
Somehow our elites have succeeded in convincing a large portion of the working class that unions are unnecessary and probably evil/corrupt.
It’s been particularly discouraging that so many recent union contracts have included the agreement to create a two-tiered system, where older members retain more of the benefits they had, while newer members are expected to accept far less.
My parents best friend, a retired Chicago fireman told me, as regards their most recent contract, “We fought for ours, those guys will have to fight for their own.”
Ironic that in America, solidarity = Socialism = that evil Communism, when in reality, and not too long ago either, it was an organization called ‘Solidarity’, rooted in an independent labor union, that chalked up one of the first grand victories over a Communist government, that of Poland, and arguably, advancing the eventual fall of the Soviet Union.
There is a lot of truth in that quote but it varied by city. In Chicago and Detroit, a lot of blacks arrived before the 1960s and were able, at least for awhile, to get decent (relatively speaking) factory work. But in places like Milwaukee and lots of smaller northern cities, it’s true that there weren’t significant black populations until the 1950s and 60s, which was very late in the game.
I know NC has covered this previously, but a huge factor in destroying black business was the interstate highway system. In virtually every big city, if the interstate was routed through town, it was routed right through the black neighborhood(s), which were perceived as “ghettos” from the outside but which were in most cases very diverse economically, home to lots of black professionals and small business people. Legal (redlining, property covenants, etc.) and illegal racism made it impossible to recreate these neighborhoods elsewhere.
This puts the Black Lives Matter highway blockages in a new context. (I’m trying to recall a Black Lives Matter march specifically to protest a recent destructive routing of the Interstate… Milwaukee?)
Minneapolis, we’ve had several.
Edit: Oh, I misread that. BLM shut down a highway the mall of america and the airport, 2 separate incidents.
This reminds me of when I saw Rosa Parks speak. In all of my history books and all of the accolades for her people focus on her decision to sit. But what she chose to speak about was not that but the long amount of work she, and crucially others, had been doing before that to support others, to organize events, and to communicate. She was not some innocent woman who suddenly turned pro. She was in fact a dedicated backroom supporter who was already involved in civil rights and had been for a long time who finally reached a breaking point.
Without that organization in place there would have been no consequence to her well known act. And she made plain in her speech that the organization was what she looked back on.
As an interesting side note I learned later she was “known” as an organizer locally and the bus driver in question was known as the worst of the worst who took joy in enforcing the rules. His decision to goad her every day is why she reached the breaking point.
On a different but related note John Howard Griffin also notes the importance of black businesses in his book Black Like Me where he comments on the role that black diners played as a forum for formal and informal organizing and communication. And later the role that black finance (i.e. S&Ls) played in via community-based lending. In essence they created growth by supporting successful small businesses in mortgages and then the white banks wanted in whereas before they had been content to ignore it.
Rosa Parks relocated to Detroit at some point and I saw her speak a couple of times. She was still a pistol late into her 80s.
To me, all this makes Parks more impressive, not less.
Rosa Parks was a plant. She got her story from two black teenagers that it happened to a few month prior. They cast Mrs. Parks for it because she was more sympathetic to the general public and hyped it after. Coincidently MLK was her pastor and that is how he got his start.
I’m somewhat familiar with this topic because of my interest in baseball history. Just like Rosa Parks, Jackie Robinson relied on a network of black businessmen and families for housing when reporting to Spring Training in Florida in 1946 and ’47. And the Negro League teams of the 1920’s to 1940’s were black-owned businesses, some of them much better financed and managed than others.
The locations of those teams (D.C., Pittsburgh, Philly, Newark, Detroit, Cincinnati, Chicago, Kansas City, Memphis, and Atlanta) neatly coincide with the places where black business thrived. All of them relied on bus operators and motel owners as they traveled to play their road games through sometimes hostile territory.