Our Black Year (13 page)

But, inevitably, people misconstrued our patronage of those Black-owned businesses as racist, which continued to confound us. Obviously, these name-callers didn't know their history. Like almost every other ethnic group does for its own, Blacks have a long tradition of advocating for their compatriots to support their community by buying Black.

The concept of buying Black might trace its formal introduction to the last day of summer, 1832, when Maria Stewart stood in front of an audience of Blacks and at least a few Whites—men and women—in Boston's Franklin Hall and confronted them about the already touchy issues of race and gender. In the process, that brave lady became something of a great-great-auntie to The Ebony Experiment.

“Daughters of Africa, awake!” she exhorted. “It is of no use for us to sit with our hands folded, hanging our heads.... Let us make a mighty effort and arise . . . and let us raise a fund ourselves. Do you ask, what can we do? Unite and build a store of your own. Fill one side with drygoods and the other with groceries. Do you ask, where is the money? We have spent more than enough for nonsense to do what building we should want.”

Stewart, a woman whose life would make a great movie—are you reading this, Oprah?—was quite possibly the first African American, male or female, to call publicly, if somewhat indirectly, on Blacks to support each other in business.

Now lost to the pages of history, this feisty woman, whom historian William Andrew called “the first Black feminist-abolitionist in America,”
was born in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1803 and orphaned at the age of five. She worked as a domestic, and at twenty-three she married “independent shipping agent” James Stewart. A veteran of the War of 1812, he was then forty-seven. The couple regularly attended the African Baptist Church on the north side of Beacon Hill, where their circle of friends included the activist David Walker, who became Maria's mentor.

Three devastating events would light the fire of righteousness in Maria. First was the death of her husband of three years from heart disease. While reeling from the loss, Stewart suffered another setback: Her husband's White business associates robbed her of his estate. Nine months later David Walker was found dead near the entrance to his business, likely a victim of consumption, although whispers of something more diabolical persisted.

Instead of crumbling in the aftermath of such trauma, Stewart got angry and inspired, writing opinion pieces, speaking publicly, and calling on Blacks to lift themselves up from their spiritual, educational, and economic depths—nearly a decade before “The Great Abolitionist” Frederick Douglass started public outcries against racial injustice. In fact, Stewart was the originator of themes that Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Frances Harper, and even W. E. B. Du Bois later gave broader exposure.

For her trouble, she was run out of Boston—partly by her own people—and spent the rest of her life teaching at the Williamsburg Colored School in New York, then later in Baltimore and Washington, DC. She died in 1879.

“It would take deep faith to find hope for African Americans in the political landscape of 1830s America,” writes Cheryl R. Jorgensen-Earp, professor of communications at Lynchburg College, in her 2006 piece for the journal
Voices of Democracy
. “Stewart found signs pointing to the secular redemption of black America in the sacred text of the Bible and provided them as a guide for what she knew would be a perilous journey.” Her faith “served a black nationalist vision of unity, struggle, and progress.” She was, Jorgensen-Earp writes, a woman with a “distinctive voice and prescient vision.”

Stewart may have been the first formal promoter of African American self-help economics, but the concept got its start well before she stepped up to the podium at Franklin Hall. In the early years of enslavement in North America, African slaves created secret burial societies—about which they kept quiet out of concern that their owners would perceive them as conspiracies—to help them accumulate money for an opulent funeral, which they believed would guarantee a successful afterlife. Those secret organizations led to the establishment of mutual aid societies, the first Black economic empowerment networks in the United States. These included the African Union Society, begun in 1780 in Newport, Rhode Island, and the Free African Society, founded in 1787 in Philadelphia.

Just one year after Stewart delivered her speech, the National Negro Convention, the first national organization of African Americans that opposed slavery and advocated for Black economic empowerment, issued a directive that “black businesspeople would only sell, and black consumers would only buy those products that had not been produced from slave labor.”

The “free produce movement,” organized with these goals in mind, began in the mid-1820s. An African American produce store owner in Philadelphia, Lydia White, received this vote of confidence from the Convention in 1833: “All who feel an interest in promoting the cause of universal freedom, is [sic] cheerfully recommended to her store.” In 1841 the Female Trading Association, a New York grocery store cooperative run by one hundred African American women, sold grits, rice, soap, candles, brooms, and brushes, among other items. At least one newspaper, the
Colored American
, advocated for Blacks to support it because, as the newspaper stated, “We believe this is the first successful organized effort of this kind among the colored people of this city.”

Twenty years later Martin Robison Delaney, a Pennsylvania newspaper publisher and physician, documented the growth of Black businesses prior to the Civil War in his book,
The Condition, Elevation, Emigration and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States
. Delaney was an ardent supporter of touting Black business success as a vindication of Black
society that would enhance racial pride and keep money in Black communities. In his book Delaney uses the phrase “buy black” in a chapter entitled, “Our Elevation in the United States,” in which he encourages antebellum Blacks to do just that. Without this, African American–pur-chased consumer goods “are the products of the white man, purchased by us from the white man, consequently our earnings and means, are all given to the white man.”

After the Civil War the devastated South needed Blacks to rebuild it. African Americans worked as tradesmen and established construction companies, but their mutual aid societies also expanded into other cooperatives, including manufacturing, real estate, banking, and insurance, mainly in response to the lack of capital available to them. By the end of the 1800s Black leaders, including W. E. B. Du Bois, were speaking at African American conferences, where they would present strategies for Blacks to succeed in business. Those strategies included, as Du Bois stated, “the mass of the Negroes (who) must learn to patronize business enterprises conducted by their own race, even at some disadvantage.” He also encouraged Black churches, schools, and newspapers to promote African American–owned businesses.

In addition to Du Bois, Booker T. Washington and Marcus Garvey became prominent leaders of the Black economic empowerment movement in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Washington, after witnessing African American rights recede in the post–Civil War South, emphasized industrial business development over political and civil rights for Blacks. His theory: “No race that has anything to contribute to the markets of the world is long in any degree ostracized.” In 1900 he helped establish the first formal business advancement network for African Americans, the National Negro Business League (NNBL), which spawned other African American business and professional groups, including the National Negro Bankers Association, National Negro Insurance Association, National Association of Funeral Directors, National Negro Retail Merchants Association, even the National Bar Association. The birth of the NNBL ushered in what has been called “the Golden Age of Black Business.”

Marcus Garvey established the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) in 1914 in his native Jamaica with the goal of boosting Blacks politically and economically all over the world. Two years later he came to Harlem and expanded the UNIA. In addition to advocating Black businesses, he lobbied for liberating Africa, promoting Black nationalism, and appreciating Black culture, in the process converting UNIA into one of the most powerful Black organizations in the world.

Groups were springing up all over the country to support fellow Blacks. In 1915, for example, the Atlanta Mutual Insurance Association organized a Boosters Club “to encourage Negroes to trade with one another, to buy groceries, take out insurance, buy medicine, and employ Negro professional men in every case where it can be done without inconvenience or inefficiency.” By 1919 more than 140 chartered Negro Business Leagues were functioning in 30 states. In the 1920s these groups took their actions national, urging African Americans to “Buy Something From a Negro Merchant!” and promoting National Negro Trade Weeks. In the 1930s editors of the Chicago newspaper
Whip
established “Don't Buy Where You Can't Work” campaigns that caught on in other cities. In a July 1931 editorial appearing in
The Crisis
magazine, Du Bois wrote, “If we once make a religion of our determination to spend our meager income so far as possible only in such ways as will bring us employment consideration and opportunity, the possibilities before us are enormous.... A nation twice as large as Portugal, Holland, or Sweden is not powerless—is not merely a supplicant beggar for crumbs—it is a mighty economic power when it gets vision enough to use its strength.”

This was an era of robust growth for Black cooperatives—individuals or businesses (agricultural, financial, or social) can pool their resources to exert stronger economic leverage than any one or two of those entities could alone. There was the Colored Merchants' Association, a chain of thirty-five Black grocery stores, established in 1928 in Montgomery, Alabama; the Florida Farmers' Cooperative; and the Tyrrell Credit Union, in Columbia, North Carolina. Churches operated cooperatives. Even
Black colleges had the Community Consumers Cooperative, founded at Georgia State College in 1934, and the People's Cooperative supermarket at the Tuskegee Institute. Du Bois's 1907 study, “Economic Co-operation among Negro Americans,” details the extensive number of “cooperatively supported schools, mutual aid societies, hospitals and churches in the late nineteenth century.” There were also seventy-five to a hundred homes for orphans and the elderly as well as forty hospitals, all supported by African Americans. This kind of cooperation, according to Du Bois, was a direct result of Whites' economic oppression of Blacks and centuries of extreme poverty for African Americans.

Whatever the reasons for its genesis, nobody would dispute the impact of that cooperation. Du Bois published a study in 1898 that reported only nineteen hundred “Negro-owned” businesses; in 1930 that number was seventy thousand. What's interesting about this explosion of enterprises is that it came with growing numbers of Blacks in white-collar jobs, many of which were in Black businesses. Imagine what might have occurred if the number of white-collar jobs continued to increase.

At about this time thriving Black business communities were emerging in midsize cities. Two of the more prominent were the “Black Wall Streets” of Durham, North Carolina, and Tulsa, Oklahoma. In Durham an assortment of Black businesses flourished on the south side of Parrish Street, including fifteen grocery stores, eight barbershops, seven meat and fish dealers, and two drugstores, not to mention doctors, lawyers, and other professionals as well as financing and insurance companies. Hell, I could have done 90 percent of my shopping without getting in a car—or buggy—if I lived near such a business district. White businesses occupied the north side of the street, and apparently the setup worked. “We have in Durham today the outstanding group of colored capitalists who have entered the second generation of business enterprise,” sociologist E. F. Frazier wrote in 1923. “These men have mastered the technique of modern business and acquired the spirit of modern enterprise.”

In his 1927 book
The Story of Durham, City of the New South
, historian William Kenneth Boyd attributed the success of Parrish Street to
Blacks who'd come to Durham after the Civil War, folks he described as “industrious and thrifty citizens” who “established a tradition of industry, reliability, and integrity.” And here's one of his more intriguing observations: “A second factor in the progress of the Negro,” Boyd wrote, “has been the policy of white people, a policy of tolerance and helpfulness.”

The Tulsa story was similar, except on a larger scale. Greenwood Avenue was the main artery of the commercial district, which folks also called Greenwood. From the early 1900s until 1921 the number of Black-owned businesses grew to more than six hundred, including a Black-owned bus line, six real estate companies, wealthy oilmen, construction firms, and other entrepreneurs. African American attorneys and about fifteen Black doctors and surgeons also had offices on Tulsa's Black Wall Street. More than forty grocery stores and meat markets were there, as were thirty restaurants and four hotels. Several Black millionaires had businesses in Greenwood, six of whom owned private planes—at a time when there were only two airports in the entire state.

Urban renewal in the 1960s destroyed Durham's Black Wall Street. This “renewal” brought construction of the East-West Expressway—now known as the Durham Freeway—through the neighborhood, killing hundreds of Black-owned businesses and displacing thousands of residents.

The demise of Tulsa's Black Wall Street came in a cauldron of racial violence. It started with the arrest of a young Black shoeshine man, Dick Rowland, on dubious charges that he'd raped a White woman. While he sat in the courthouse jail on May 31, 1921, an angry mob of Whites gathered outside with the plan to lynch him. Armed Blacks intervened, and a scuffle ensued. A gunshot was fired, and a race riot ignited.