The Business of Black Power
The Business of Black Power: Community Development, Capitalism, and Corporate Responsibility in Postwar America
Laura Warren Hill
Julia Rabig
Copyright Date: 2012
Published by: Boydell and Brewer,
Pages: 360
https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7722/j.ctt81zb4
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Book Info
The Business of Black Power
Book Description:

The Business of Black Power emphasizes the centrality of economic goals to the larger black freedom movement and explores the myriad forms of business development in the Black power era. This volume charts a new course for Black power studies and business history, exploring both the business ventures that Black power fostered and the impact of Black power on the nation's business world. Black activists pressed business leaders, corporations, and various levels of government into supporting a range of economic development ventures, from Black entrepreneurship, to grassroots experiments in economic self-determination, to indigenous attempts to rebuild inner-city markets in the wake of disinvestment. They pioneered new economic and development strategies, often in concert with corporate executives and public officials. Yet these same actors also engaged in fierce debates over the role of business in strengthening the movement, and some African Americans outright rejected capitalism or collaboration with business. The ten scholars in this collection bring fresh analysis to this complex intersection of African American and business history to reveal how Black power advocates, or those purporting a Black power agenda, engaged business to advance their economic, political, and social goals. They show the business of Black power taking place in the streets, boardrooms, journals and periodicals, corporations, courts, and housing projects of America. In short, few were left untouched by the influence of this movement. Laura Warren Hill is assistant professor of history at Bloomfield College. Julia Rabig is a lecturer at Dartmouth College.

eISBN: 978-1-58046-775-9
Subjects: History
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  1. Front Matter
    Front Matter (pp. i-vi)
  2. Table of Contents
    Table of Contents (pp. vii-viii)
  3. Acknowledgments
    Acknowledgments (pp. ix-x)
  4. Introduction
    Introduction (pp. 1-14)
    Laura Warren Hill and Julia Rabig

    “I thought I’d been given the shit detail,” recalled longtime activist turned scholar Komozi Woodard, of a time in the early seventies when the prominent Black power leader Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) assigned him to organize economic development efforts in their hometown of Newark, New Jersey.¹ At the time, “the sexy assignments were politics like African Liberation and the Gary Convention,” said Woodard. “In college when people talked about Black power, we weren’t talking about ‘cooperative economics’! Economics was that ‘Black box’ that people mentioned but never looked inside.”²

    How do we interpret Woodard’s reaction to his assignment—his sense...

  5. Chapter One Toward a History of the Business of Black Power
    Chapter One Toward a History of the Business of Black Power (pp. 15-42)
    Laura Warren Hill and Julia Rabig

    The business of Black power was an unprecedented collaboration among grassroots organizations, business owners, corporate executives, and government officials in the 1960s and early 1970s. Mainstream journalists eagerly—if not always accurately—chronicled its development. Government officials, most notably Richard Nixon, sought to discipline it. White-owned corporations sought to harness it in the service of a marketable Black aesthetic. Many commentators reduced the business of Black power to a narrowly defined Black capitalism. But the business of Black power was not just the sum of its parts. It was a conversation—about what kind of economic system would realize the...

  6. Part One: Black Capitalism in Pursuit of Black Freedom
    • Chapter Two FIGHTing for the Soul of Black Capitalism: Struggles for Black Economic Development in Postrebellion Rochester
      Chapter Two FIGHTing for the Soul of Black Capitalism: Struggles for Black Economic Development in Postrebellion Rochester (pp. 45-67)
      Laura Warren Hill

      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...

    • Chapter Three A McDonald’s That Reflects the Soul of a People: Hough Area Development Corporation and Community Development in Cleveland
      Chapter Three A McDonald’s That Reflects the Soul of a People: Hough Area Development Corporation and Community Development in Cleveland (pp. 68-92)
      Nishani Frazier

      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...

  7. Part Two: Selling Women, Culture, and Black Power
    • Chapter Four Black (Buying) Power: The Story of Essence Magazine
      Chapter Four Black (Buying) Power: The Story of Essence Magazine (pp. 95-115)
      Alexis Pauline Gumbs

      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,...

    • Chapter Five Creating a Multicultural Soul: Avon, Corporate Social Responsibility, and Race in the 1970s
      Chapter Five Creating a Multicultural Soul: Avon, Corporate Social Responsibility, and Race in the 1970s (pp. 116-138)
      Lindsey Feitz

      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...

    • [Illustrations]
      [Illustrations] (pp. 139-154)
  8. Part Three: The Business of Black Power in City and Suburb
    • Chapter Six From Landless to Landlords: Black Power, Black Capitalism, and the Co-optation of Detroit’s Tenants’ Rights Movement, 1964–69
      Chapter Six From Landless to Landlords: Black Power, Black Capitalism, and the Co-optation of Detroit’s Tenants’ Rights Movement, 1964–69 (pp. 157-183)
      David Goldberg

      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,...

    • Chapter Seven “Gilding the Ghetto” and Debates over Chicago’s Gautreaux Program
      Chapter Seven “Gilding the Ghetto” and Debates over Chicago’s Gautreaux Program (pp. 184-214)
      Andrea Gill

      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...

  9. Part Four: Community Development Corporations and the Business of Black Power Policymaking
    • Chapter Eight “What We Need Is Brick and Mortar”: Race, Gender, and Early Leadership of the Bedford-Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation
      Chapter Eight “What We Need Is Brick and Mortar”: Race, Gender, and Early Leadership of the Bedford-Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation (pp. 217-244)
      Brian Purnell

      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...

    • Chapter Nine “A Fight and a Question”: Community Development Corporations, Machine Politics, and Corporate Philanthropy in the Long Urban Crisis
      Chapter Nine “A Fight and a Question”: Community Development Corporations, Machine Politics, and Corporate Philanthropy in the Long Urban Crisis (pp. 245-273)
      Julia Rabig

      “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...

  10. Conclusion: Whose Black Power? The Business of Black Power and Black Power’s Business
    Conclusion: Whose Black Power? The Business of Black Power and Black Power’s Business (pp. 274-303)
    Michael O. West

    “I used to shine shoes in front of a radio station,” the singer James Brown liked to inform listeners in the era of Black power. “Now I own radio stations. You know what that is? That’s Black Power.”¹ Brown’s pithy conflation of Black capitalism with Black power was music to the ears of the powers that be, circles in which he moved seamlessly. As nimble politically as he was musically, Brown provided entertainment at a state dinner hosted by President Lyndon Johnson in May 1968, only to reappear in the same role at Richard Nixon’s inaugural ball the following March,...

  11. Epilogue: Whatever Happened to the Business of Black Power?
    Epilogue: Whatever Happened to the Business of Black Power? (pp. 304-312)
    Robert E. Weems Jr.

    On a cursory level, the Black power movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s, almost instinctively, conjures up images of large Afros, clenched fists, and dashikis. Yet, as the essays in this volume reveal, this period also featured substantive discussion and action regarding African American economic development. Nevertheless, just as the Afro soon gave way to the “Jheri Curl” and other creations of professional hair stylists, notions of supporting Black enterprise, likewise, apparently became outdated. Still, here in the second decade of the twenty-first century, as we observe the ongoing deterioration of many urban Black enclaves, it is clear...

  12. List of Contributors
    List of Contributors (pp. 313-314)
  13. Index
    Index (pp. 315-343)
  14. Back Matter
    Back Matter (pp. 344-344)