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Lending a Hand: Black Business Owners’ Complex Role in the Civil Rights Movement

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2020

LOUIS A. FERLEGER  and
MATTHEW LAVALLEE
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Abstract

This article explores the powerful ways in which black business owners supported the Civil Rights movement. Business owners such as Leah Chase, Gus Courts, A. G. Gaston, and Amzie Moore, among others, contributed resources and organizational skills to the fight for racial justice. But the relationship between business owners and activists within the movement was at times characterized by tension. Although business owners sometimes found the approach of activists to be too radical and activists sometimes found the business owners’ approach to be too conservative, they found ways to compromise in order to work cooperatively toward racial justice.

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Type
Article
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Enterprise & Society , Volume 21 , Issue 2 , June 2020 , pp. 494 - 515
Copyright
© The Author 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Business History Conference. All rights reserved.

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Footnotes

This article was supported by a research grant from the Institute for New Economic Thinking. The authors appreciate the helpful suggestions made by Andrew Popp, Thomas Ferguson, Lynn Parramore, and the two anonymous referees. The authors are also grateful for feedback received on earlier versions of the paper presented at the World Economic History Congress in August 2018 and at the New Directions in Modern US History Workshop at Boston University in May 2018.

References

Bibliography of Works Cited

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New Yorker

New York Times

Washington Monthly

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Heller, Nathan. “Out of Action.” New Yorker , August 21, 2017, 70–77.Google Scholar
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Marshall, David. “A.G. Gaston.” Black Enterprise, 6, no. 12 (July 1976): 31.Google Scholar
Stout, David. “A. G. Gaston, 103, a Champion of Black Economic Advances.” New York Times, January 20, 1996.Google Scholar
Winford, Brandon K. “‘The Bright Sunshine of a New Day’: John Hervey Wheeler, Black Business, and Civil Rights in North Carolina, 1929–1964.” North Carolina Historical Review, 93 (July 2016): 235–279.Google Scholar
U.S. Bureau of the Census. Minority-owned Businesses: 1969. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1971.Google Scholar
U.S. Department of Labor. The Economic Situation of Negroes in the United States. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1962.Google Scholar
Andrews, Kenneth T. Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: The Mississippi Civil Rights Movement and Its Legacy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Arnesen, Eric, ed., The Black Worker. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007.Google Scholar
Baradaran, Mehrsa. The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2017.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bean, Jonathan L. Beyond the Broker State: Federal Policies Toward Small Business, 1936–1961. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996.Google Scholar
Beito, David T., and Beito, Linda Royster. Black Maverick: T.R.M. Howard’s Fight for Civil Rights and Economic Power. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009.Google Scholar
Blackford, Mansel G. A History of Small Business in America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003.Google Scholar
Boston, Michael B. The Business Strategy of Booker T. Washington: Its Development and Implementation. Tampa: University of Florida Press, 2010.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Boston, Thomas D. Race, Class and Conservatism. Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1988.Google Scholar
Branch, Taylor. Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954–63. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988.Google Scholar
Branch, Taylor. At Canaan’s Edge: America in the King Years 1965–68. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006.Google Scholar
Branch, Taylor. The King Years: Historic Moments in the Civil Rights Movement. New York: Simon &Schuster, 2013.Google Scholar
Brown, James K., and Lusterman, Seymour. Business and the Development of Ghetto Enterprise. New York: Conference Board, 1971.Google Scholar
Brown-Nagin, Tomiko. Courage to Dissent: Atlanta and the Long History of the Civil Rights Movement. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Butler, John Sibley. Entrepreneurship and Self-Help among Black Americans: A Reconsideration of Race and Economics. Albany: SUNY Press, 1991.Google Scholar
Chappell, David L. Inside Agitators: White Southerners in the Civil Rights Movement. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994.Google Scholar
Crespino, Joseph. In Search of Another Country: Mississippi and the Conservative Counterrevolution. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007.Google Scholar
Cross, Theodore. Black Capitalism: Strategy for Business in the Ghetto. New York: Atheneum, 1969.Google Scholar
Davis, Joshua Clark. From Head Shops to Whole Foods: The Rise and Fall of Activist Entrepreneurs. New York: Columbia University Press, 2017.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ferguson, Thomas, and Rogers, Joel. Right Turn: The Decline of the Democrats and the Future of American Politics. New York: Hill and Wang, 1986.Google Scholar
Fusfeld, Daniel R. The Basic Economics of the Urban Racial Crisis. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1973.Google Scholar
Garrow, David J. Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. New York: William Morrow, 1986.Google Scholar
Garrow, David J., ed., The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It: The Memoir of Jo Ann Gibson Robinson. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1987.Google Scholar
Gaston, A. G. Green Power: The Successful Way of A.G. Gaston. Birmingham: Birmingham Publishing Company, 1968.Google Scholar
Gill, Tiffany M. Beauty Shop Politics: African American Women’s Activism in the Beauty Industry. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010.Google Scholar
Harris, William H. Keeping the Faith: A. Philip Randolph, Milton P. Webster, and the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, 1925–37. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977.Google Scholar
Hilton, Bruce. The Delta Ministry. London: Macmillan, 1969.Google Scholar
Hoekstra, Dave. The People’s Place: Soul Food Restaurants and Reminiscences from the Civil Rights Era to Today. Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2015.Google Scholar
Hunt, Martin, and Hunt, Jacqueline. The History of Black Business. Chicago: Knowledge Express, 1998.Google Scholar
Jackson, Troy. Becoming King: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Making of a National Leader. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2008.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jenkins, Carol, and Elizabeth Gardner Hines. Black Titan: A.G. Gaston and the Making of a Black American Millionaire. New York: One World, 2004Google Scholar
King, Martin Luther, Jr. Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story. New York: Harper & Row, 1958.Google Scholar
Newman, Mark. Divine Agitators: The Delta Ministry and Civil Rights in Mississippi. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2004.Google Scholar
Ofari, Earl. The Myth of Black Capitalism. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1970.Google Scholar
Parris, Addison W. The Small Business Administration. New York: Praeger, 1968.Google Scholar
Payne, Charles M. I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.Google Scholar
Powledge, Fred. Free at Last? The Civil Rights Movement and the People Who Made It. Boston: Little, Brown, 1991.Google Scholar
Smith, Suzanne E. To Serve the Living: Funeral Directors and the African American Way of Death. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2010.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Srnicek, Nick, and Williams, Alex. Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work. London: Verso, 2017.Google Scholar
Swinton, David H., and Ellison, Julian. Aggregate Personal Income of the Black Population in the USA 1947–1980. Black Economic Research Center Monograph No. 3. New York: Black Economic Research Center, 1973.Google Scholar
Tufekci, Zeynep. Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017.Google Scholar
Tye, Larry. Rising from the Rails: Pullman Porters and the Making of the Black Middle Class. New York: Henry Holt, 2004.Google Scholar
Walker, Juliet E. K. The History of Black Business in America: Capitalism, Race, Entrepreneurship. New York: McMillan Library Reference, 1998.Google Scholar
Walker, Juliet E. K. Encyclopedia of African American Business History. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999.Google Scholar
Weems, Robert., Jr. Desegregating the Dollar: African American Consumerism in the Twentieth Century. New York: New York University Press, 1998.Google Scholar
Wilson, William Julius. The Declining Significance of Race: Blacks and Changing American Institutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978.Google Scholar
Wright, Gavin. Sharing the Prize: The Economics of the Civil Rights Revolution in the American South. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2013.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brimmer, Andrew. “Desegregation and Negro Leadership.” In Business Leadership and the Negro Crisis, edited by Ginzberg, Eli. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968.Google Scholar
Corley, Robert. “In Search of Racial Harmony.” In Southern Businessmen and Desegregation, edited by Jacoway, Elizabeth and Colburn, David. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982.Google Scholar
Feldman, Brian S. “The Decline of Black Business.” Washington Monthly. March/April/May 2017.Google Scholar
Freedman, Richard. “Changes in the Labor Market for Black Americans, 1948–1972.” Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, 1 (1973): 67–120.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Garrett-Scott, Shenette Monique. “‘He Ran His Business Like a White Man’: Race, Entrepreneurship, and the Early National Negro Business League in the New South.” MA thesis, University of Texas at Austin, 2006.Google Scholar
Heller, Nathan. “Out of Action.” New Yorker , August 21, 2017, 70–77.Google Scholar
Hofstadter, Richard. “What Happened to the Antitrust Movement?” In The Paranoid Style in American Politics, chap. 6. New York: Vintage, 2008.Google Scholar
Marshall, David. “A.G. Gaston.” Black Enterprise, 6, no. 12 (July 1976): 31.Google Scholar
Stout, David. “A. G. Gaston, 103, a Champion of Black Economic Advances.” New York Times, January 20, 1996.Google Scholar
Winford, Brandon K. “‘The Bright Sunshine of a New Day’: John Hervey Wheeler, Black Business, and Civil Rights in North Carolina, 1929–1964.” North Carolina Historical Review, 93 (July 2016): 235–279.Google Scholar
U.S. Bureau of the Census. Minority-owned Businesses: 1969. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1971.Google Scholar
U.S. Department of Labor. The Economic Situation of Negroes in the United States. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1962.Google Scholar