African Americans in Business and Entrepreneurship

Leadership experts Leon C. Prieto and Simone T.A. Phipps reflect on some of the leading Black business pioneers of the late 19th and early 20th century. These leaders show that contemporary entrepreneurs of African descent would do well to regain a cooperative advantage in order to achieve the levels of success that existed in the past.

African American entrepreneurship has been an integral part of the American economy since the 1600s, and achieved economic gains under difficult circumstances. Besides providing a penetrating glimpse into the world of Black entrepreneurship both past and present, this book urges African Americans to gain financial independence as entrepreneurs.

The Tulsa Race Massacre was one of the most brutal acts of racist violence in U.S. history, a ruthless attempt to smother a spark of Black independence. But that was never the whole story of Greenwood. Journalist Victor Luckerson weaves an epic tale about a neighborhood that refused, more than once, to be erased.

Tara A. Dudley examines the influence of gens de couleur libres--free people of color--in a multiracial New Orleans. This intimate microhistory explores how gens de couleur libres used ownership, engagement, and entrepreneurship to construct individual and group identity and stability.

Robert E. Weems Jr. and Jason P. Chambers curate a collection of essays that place Chicago as the center of the Black business world in the United States. The scholars examine how factors like the influx of southern migrants and the city's unique segregation patterns made Chicago a prolific incubator of productive business development and made building a Black metropolis as much a necessity as an opportunity.

Founder of a beauty empire, Madam C.J. Walker was celebrated as America's first self-made female millionaire in the early 1900s. Known as a leading African American entrepreneur, Walker was also devoted to an activist philanthropy aimed at empowering African Americans and challenging the injustices inflicted by Jim Crow.

Binga is the definitive full-length biography of Jesse Binga, the first Black banker in Chicago. Don Hayner recounts this gripping story about race, history, politics, and finance.

Provides a history of America's first black millionaires--former slaves who endured incredible challenges to amass and maintain their wealth for a century, from the Jacksonian period to the Roaring Twenties--self-made entrepreneurs whose unknown success mirrored that of American business heroes such as Henry Ford, John D. Rockefeller, and Thomas Edison. Between the years of 1830 and 1927, as the last generation of blacks born into slavery was reaching maturity, a small group of men and women broke new ground to attain the highest levels of financial success.