An Endangered Species

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 in the US, legally ended racial segregation ....

Black Businesses Thrived In The 1950's

 ..... but with it also went an entire Afro-American economic and social sub culture. 

This had consisted of Black universities/Colleges, Schools, Shops, Hotels, Launderettes, Restaurants and entertainment/media streams such as Cinemas, Newspapers, Magazines (such as Jet), and entertainment clubs such as Harlem's famous Cotton Club, and Club Ebony. 

In many ways this act was actually a disaster for the black community, because many of these black run businesses have now largely folded in the decades since, as mainstream American businesses now chased the black dollar, and simply pushed the niche black businesses that had operated in the old parallel economy, to one side.

Now, sizeable black owned and run businesses, like the black-owned manufacturer the Pacific Parachute Company (WWII Parachute makers), and the R. H. Boyd Publishing Company (printing materials for black churches and schools), are largely gone, a thing of the past. Those black owned businesses once provided a large number of avenues of upward mobility, for generations of black Americans, and supplied critical leadership and financial support for the civil rights movement.

Today, the Black Enterprise magazine lists the USA’s top 100 black-owned businesses such as World Wide Technology, which, since its founding in 1990, has grown into a global firm with more than $7 billion in revenue, and 3,000 employees, and Oprah Winfrey’s Harpo Productions. The top 100 companies listed now value at more than $24 billion, a ninefold increase since 1973, adjusting for inflation.

However these impressive figures hide the real trend, which is rather that of a steep decline in the number of black owned businesses, in which tens of thousands of black-owned retail establishments and local service companies have simply disappeared, having either gone out of business, or been acquired by larger mainstream companies. Today, working-age black Americans are far less likely to be their own boss than in the 1990's or preceding decades ... a fact accelerated by the decline in the enforcement of anti-monopoly and fair trade laws beginning since the late 1970s, which has created giants who dominate whole US markets and sectors of the economy, with steep increases in both market concentration and inequality.

The Black Micro-Economy Was Distinct

This of course hurts all independent businesses, but the effects have disproportionately hit black business owners harder e.g. In 1993 the United Mutual Life Insurance Company was the last black-owned insurance company in the Northeast USA, when it was bought by MetLife, ending its sixty-three-year existence. 

Parks Sausage, founded in 1951 by Henry Parks Jr. in Baltimore, was a multimillion-dollar operation, selling pork products from New England to Virginia, and becoming the first black-owned business on the New York Stock Exchange. But the company fell into bankruptcy after management issues, and attempts to revive it since a buy-out in 1996, have struggled and failed, in an increasingly consolidated meatpacking industry, in which the four largest meat packers controlled 78 percent of the market and locked up distribution. 

Similar trends occurred in other sectors such as supermarkets, beauty product production (especially the hair care industry), and to black-owned firms in the funeral homes, entertainment, communications, and publishing sectors. In 2005, a group of investors purchased the nation’s oldest black-owned bank, Consolidated Bank & Trust Co, taking its ownership out of black hands.

Unintended consequence, are the blight of political and economic planning. Those black businessmen such as grocery store owner Daniel Speed in Tallahassee, drug store owner Gilbert R. Mason in Biloxi, funeral home owner William Shortridge in Alabama, and A. G. Gaston, owner of the Smith and Gaston Funeral Home, all of whom financed civil rights activities in the 1950s and 1960s, cannot have thought that sixty years after the struggle, their breed would be a disappearing species.

Some Black American commentators have noted these and other negative trends, but their wake up calls are often met with abuse, by a community that prefers to blame others for its failings. A recent example of this, was the eulogy given at Aretha Franklin's funeral by the Rev. Jasper Williams Jr, which touched on Black America 'losing its soul', and lamented the fact that integration, he said, has resulted in fewer black-owned businesses and control. 

Update February 2023:

A lady called Laurie has emailed us at PC Towers, to ask that we advise readers of this post, of an article that lists more than 150 Black-owned businesses in North America. The article is here. She hopes that listing it here, will help promote these Black-owned sites and stores. Happy to oblige Laurie.