In July 1964, Rochester, New York, exploded in one of the era’s first so-called race riots. More than anything else, this rebellion highlighted the urgent need for economic development in the nation’s ghettos. The events in Rochester, a mid-sized, financially successful, and predominantly white city, also signaled trouble for a broad cross-section of the nation’s urban centers. This uprising, combined with those in Harlem and Philadelphia, signaled a new form of protest in the Black liberation movement. If Rochester, indeed most cities, was to maintain its postwar prosperity and the peace it brought, the economic well-being of the Black community...

Professional smiles, proud faces, and business-clad Black activists sporting perfectly coiffed naturals dot the pages of the Hough Area Development Corporation’s 1974–75 Annual Report, titled Building a Community That Reflects the Soul of Its People.¹ The community activists of Hough Area Development Corporation (HADC) had reason to be proud. Cleveland’s Black activists built an organization whose work ranked among the most unique and innovative of efforts for economic growth in the Black power era. Founded in 1967, several years before this 1974 Annual Report, HADC boasted significant achievements in banking, job training, housing, employment, and individual business ownership. By...

From its inception in 1970, Essence gained its reputation as a provocative Black women’s magazine by celebrating—and marketing—a Black power aesthetic. Its founders and editors hoped to both support the egalitarian society promoted by the revolutionary Black liberation movement and profit from it. But to do so, Essence would need to capture the attention of upwardly mobile Black women—newly empowered by the civil rights and Black power movements—who were willing to reproduce Black social norms and consumption patterns.Essence would then provide advertisers privileged access to the expanding buying power of Black communities. Almost forty years later,...

At the height of the Black power movement, anything seemed possible, even the transformation of a national corporation like Avon, the cosmetics company that had staked its door-to-door marketing campaign on exclusive notions of white, middle-class respectability. The Black activists and corporate leaders who changed the company’s hiring policies, investment practices, and product lines in the late 1960s and 1970s applied strategies similar to those used by Black activists in Rochester, New York, and Cleveland, Ohio, to compel Fortune 500 Companies such as Xerox, Eastman Kodak, and McDonald’s to revise their definitions of corporate responsibility.¹ These activists had put Black-led...

Black Detroiters understood all too well the historical significance of struggles between landlords and the landless when Malcolm X linked freedom, self-determination, and independence to land control and ownership during his “Message to the Grassroots” speech at King Solomon Baptist Church in Detroit. Post–World War II urban redevelopment schemes—spurred locally by the 1947 Detroit Plan, and nationally by the 1949 Housing Act and 1956 Federal Highway Act—had since decimated Detroit’s historic “first ghetto,” Black Bottom; the area’s institutional epicenter, Hastings Street; and Black Detroit’s cultural capital, Paradise Valley. This area—the birthplace of the Nation of Islam,...

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the War on Poverty provided new tools for cities struggling with residential segregation; an aging, overcrowded housing stock; and the relocation of jobs to the suburbs. In the era of Black power, the purposes to which these tools would be put engendered especially fierce debates among residents and policymakers. Some seized new laws and policies to prioritize integration of poor Blacks into middle-class, predominantly white neighborhoods, arguing that eliminating residential segregation was the key to opening educational and economic opportunity. Critics of this dispersal model countered with plans for economic revitalization within Black...

On Saturday, December 10, 1966, one thousand people from Brooklyn, New York’s north-central neighborhoods gathered at P.S. 305 for the third annual Bedford-Stuyvesant Conference. They assembled in the auditorium at the invitation of the Central Brooklyn Coordinating Council (CBCC), a coalition of more than ninety community-based organizations that worked to improve conditions in predominantly Black sections of the borough. Residents faced cramped housing stock, insufficient health services, inadequate youth programming, overcrowded schools, and infrequent sanitation services. The area also suffered from increasing rates of poverty, crime, infant mortality, and unemployment. But Black areas of north-central Brooklyn, especially Bedford-Stuyvesant, were not...

“Wherever the central cities of America are going, Newark will get there first.”¹ So declared Newark, New Jersey’s first Black mayor, Kenneth Gibson, as he took the helm of the state’s largest city in 1970, three years after it experienced one of the most violent uprisings of the 1960s. Newark had shifted from a white to an African American majority in the mid-1960s, yet Black people remained vastly underrepresented in the city’s political and economic life.² Gibson prevailed over the two-term incumbent, Mayor Hugh Addonizio, with the help of a disciplined Black power front. Although many of Gibson’s allies deemed...