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"African American business enterprises History 19th century."
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Cutting Along the Color Line
Today, black-owned barber shops play a central role in African American public life. The intimacy of commercial grooming encourages both confidentiality and camaraderie, which make the barber shop an important gathering place for African American men to talk freely. But for many years preceding and even after the Civil War, black barbers endured a measure of social stigma for perpetuating inequality: though the profession offered economic mobility to black entrepreneurs, black barbers were obliged by custom to serve an exclusively white clientele. Quincy T. Mills traces the lineage from these nineteenth-century barbers to the bustling enterprises of today, demonstrating that the livelihood offered by the service economy was crucial to the development of a black commercial sphere and the barber shop as a democratic social space.Cutting Along the Color Linechronicles the cultural history of black barber shops as businesses and civic institutions. Through several generations of barbers, Mills examines the transition from slavery to freedom in the nineteenth century, the early twentieth-century expansion of black consumerism, and the challenges of professionalization, licensing laws, and competition from white barbers. He finds that the profession played a significant though complicated role in twentieth-century racial politics: while the services of shaving and grooming were instrumental in the creation of socially acceptable black masculinity, barbering permitted the financial independence to maintain public spaces that fostered civil rights politics. This sweeping, engaging history of an iconic cultural establishment shows that black entrepreneurship was intimately linked to the struggle for equality.
eBook
Black Retail Enterprise and Racial Segregation in Northern Cities before the \Ghetto\
Past research indicates that black entrepreneurship in northern cities was unaffected by residential segregation by race until after the formation of the \"ghetto.\" In the present study, however, an analysis of Census data shows that in the urban North during the late nineteenth century, the residential segregation of blacks was positively associated with blacks' shopkeeping ratio, a measure of the extent to which black retail entrepreneurs were merchants rather than peddlers. This finding accords with the theory that ethnic businesses are often supported by the residential segregation of group members. Moreover, it implies that black merchants in northern cities may have been bolstered by business ownership opportunities created by a socially and spatially segregated market of black consumers much earlier than previously believed.
Journal Article
Demographic Change and Entrepreneurial Occupations: African Americans in Northern Cities
In the early twentieth century, the African American (AA) populations of northern cities grew rapidly, whereas the foreign-born white populations of these cities stabilized. Stanley Lieberson has hypothesized that, in these cities, the resulting shifts in the ethnic composition negatively affected the economic prospects of AAs. The present study shows that the transformation of business enterprise among AAs in the urban North during 1900-1930 is consistent with this hypothesis. Census data and evidence from historical case studies suggest that the above demographic changes affected two trends: 1) a decline in the concentration of AAs in entrepreneurial occupations which served whites and 2) an increase in their concentration in entrepreneurial occupations serving other AAs.
Journal Article