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Building Businesses, Creating Communities: Residential Segregation and the Growth of African American Business in Southern Cities, 1880–1915

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 December 2011

John N. Ingham
John N. Ingham
Affiliation:
JOHN N. INGHAM is professor of history at the University of Toronto.
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Abstract

Patterns of residential segregation in late-nineteenth-century southern cities had great influence on the type of African American business that developed. They also affected the relative stability of business enterprise. In neighborhoods with a higher degree of segregation, African American entrepreneurs were able to develop vital businesses that survived the worsening climate of race relations around the turn of the century.

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Articles
Information
Business History Review , Volume 77 , Issue 4 , Winter 2003 , pp. 639 - 665
Copyright
Copyright © The President and Fellows of Harvard College 2003

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References

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6 The term “Negro Main Street” is from Carter, Wilmoth A., “Negro Main Street as a Symbol of Discrimination,” Phylon 21 (Fall 1960)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Robert L. Boyd has recently conducted a series of investigations of black business in northern cities during the years of the Great Migration (1900-1930). His findings were similar to those in this study: as segregated black communities arose in these cities, their spatial isolation increased their participation in business enterprise. The major difference from the southern cities examined in this study is that black business in the North was mostly restricted to particular services, such as bartering, beauty culture, and undertaking, as well as specialized retail areas that catered to certain ethnic needs. In southern cities, on the other hand, African Americans engaged in a much broader range of business ventures. A particularly important difference was their ownership, in most southern cities, of small corner grocery stores. See Boyd, Robert L., “Residential Segregation by Race and the Black Merchants of Northern Cities during the Early Twentieth Century,” Sociological Forum 13, no. 4 (1998): 595–609CrossRefGoogle Scholar; his “The Great Migration to the North and the Rise of Ethnic Niches for African American Women in Beauty Culture and Hairdressing,” Sociological Focus 29 (1996): 33–45CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and also his paper, “The Protected Market Hypothesis and Ethnic Residential Segregation: The Case of Black Undertakers in Northern Cities during the Great Migration,” presented to the 1997 Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association, Toronto, Canada, 9 Aug. 1997.

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10 In 1860, there were 3,237 free blacks in Charleston and 13,909 slaves. In Richmond in the same year there were 2,576 free African Americans and 11,699 slaves. Savannah had just 705 free blacks and 7,712 slaves. New Orleans had 10,689 free blacks and 13,385 slaves, while Washington had 9,209 free African Americans to just 1,774 slaves. Wade, Slavery in the Gties, 326-7.

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