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The civil rights movement in ’50s and ’60s brought about massive change for black Americans.

Years of protest, paid with the personal sacrifice of thousands culminated in the 1964 Civil Rights Act which brought new found freedoms to millions. The state machinery which had segregated white and black people, was dismantled and a new era of black advancement began. But did black people really gain from the ending of segregation in the way liberals claim?

The mayor of Detroit, recently marked the foundation of a new four block development which pays homage to the City’s long gone black business district.

The ceremony by the city’s black mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, was tinged with a level of disappointment. It was just four years ago that Kilpatrick and city council members gathered to pass a resolution to adopt a statergy to develop a separate business district in the city, to hold ‘black only’ business.

Detroit was the first American city to adopt such a plan and the move was highly controversial.

Ultimately the controversy killed the plan with founders refusing to back a project called African Town. Various community groups had also denounced the plans as ‘divisive’.

The new development is now simply an entertainment district that hopes to cater for the city’s mainly African American population.

The inspiration behind the original African Town plan is a former Detroiter, and academic Claud Anderson, who has become one of the best known advocates for special ‘black only’ economic schemes, to promote black empowerment through business enterprise

Anderson has long argued the need for what some might see as a return to racial segregated business, because he says new immigrants from Mexico and Arab countries are surpassing black people. He argues for example that because of bilingual education, school districts spend more to educate immigrant children than they do to educate black children.

Anderson says immigrants have displaced blacks from affirmative action programs, which were originally meant to correct injustices against blacks by the federal government. As a result, he said, the concept of affirmative action has been “polluted”.

What Anderson and others are concerned about is a decline in black enterprise While a sizeable black middle class grew out of the the post civil rights era, the numbers of black owned businesses which directly served their own community declined dramatically. The new black middle class advanced, not through ownership of their own business, but via career advancement in large corporate business.

While the racial landscape in many big companies has changed dramatically in the last 40 years, the percentage of black people who own their own business has not. Civil rights brought scores of black, lawyers, accountants, doctors, stock brokers, and corporate high flyers, but the one thing these new role models for black middle class life all have in common is that they work for someone else.

As one commentator once said, “however high a black person is flying, they are only one pay check away from flying out the door.”

What Detroit tried to do with it’s African Town business district plan may have be controversial, but the model for such an area is over a century old. The Oklahoma town of Tulsa had its own booming black business district called ‘Little Africa’ as long ago as the 1890s.

With over 600 businesses over 35 blocks, ‘Little Africa’ was home to over 15,000 black people and was one of the largest concentrations of black owned business ever seen in America before whites burned down the area during race riots in 1921.

Ron Wallace author of ‘Black Wall Street: A Lost Dream’ which examines the rise and fall of Tulsa’s ‘Little Africa’ says that the model for black advancement through business entraprenurers existed decades ago.

During the 19th and early 20th century, says Wallace, “physicians owned medical schools. There were also pawn shops everywhere, brothels, jewelry stores, churches, restaurants and two movie theaters. It was a time when the entire state of Oklahoma has only two airports, yet six Blacks owned their own planes. It was a very fascinating community.”

“Just to show you how wealthy a lot of Black people were, there was a banker in the neighboring town who had a wife named California Taylor. Her father owned the largest cotton gin west of the Mississippi River. When California shopped, she would take a cruise to Paris to have her clothes made.” He adds.

As Wallace argues,”In 1910, our forefathers and mothers owned 13 million acres of land at the height of racism in this country...we had our act together.”

Black enterprise developed in segregated America because blacks were excluded from white shops and the two races were kept deliberately apart. Unlike today, white own business did not go out of their way to target black customers, even if they could. The black dollar was spent with black business. Today, in contrast it’s estimated, via the U.S Census, that 95% per cent of the black community’s wealth is spent with white owned business.

Today the few traditional large black owned businesses like haircare products are in the hands of white owned corporations. In the era of segregation a black owned business was likely to cater to every aspect of a black person’s needs. From newspapers to restaurants, to beauty salons, to undertakers, every kind of minority owned business existed in every town and city in America.

Greensboro’s East Market Street, Savannah’s West Broad Street, and Jacksonville’s Ashley Street are Florida examples of thriving black business districts that once anchored black communities across the segregated South.

Today, few traces of these bustling hubs of African American economic, political, and social activity remain. During the 1960s thousands of black-owned banks, restaurants, insurance companies, funeral homes, barbershops, theaters, and other businesses disappeared, victims of urban renewal and shifts in consumer activity encouraged by the dismantling of segregation.

Leroy Beavers, a barber in Savannah for fifty years, remembers when the West Broad Street’s thriving black-owned businesses catered for every need of the city's African-American community.

“From Broughton all the way to Henry Street was black business: black undertakers, black taxi service, black theaters, black hotels, black restaurants, black bars. We didn't need to go to Broughton Street [the primary white business area]. We’d go there maybe to pay a light bill, maybe. I never did go to Broughton.” Recalls Beavers

The decline of black downtown business districts, was accelerated by the combined effects of urban renewal – known to many as ‘Negro removal.’

For Savannah mayor Floyd Adams, the benefits of the city’s urban renewal largely bypassed African Americans. Many black business owners who attempted to relocate with federal assistance failed, Adams remembered, because they were separated from their local clientele and discriminated against by local banks.

In Washington DC, home to the White House, there were only about 15 black businesses in 1886, but by 1920, with segregation in full fury, there were more than 300.

Despite racial inequality, this was a proud community. "We had everything we needed," recalls one older resident. "And we felt good about it. Our churches, our schools, banks, department stores, food stores. And we did very well."

The community shared responsibility for its children. As one elderly resident recalls: "There was no family my family didn't know or that didn't know me. I couldn't go three blocks without people knowing exactly where I had been and everything I did on the way."

The late Thurlow Tibbs recalled, "We are forced to deal with one another on every economic level. In my block we had school teachers, a mail man, a retired garbage man, and a registrar of Howard University."

Like those who lived through the wartime blitz in London, many elderly black residents feel that a positive, community spirit ended with the demise of segregation. As one Washington historian wrote: “With the end of segregation, as free choice replaced a community of necessity, the area began to change. The black residents dispersed. Eventually the street would become better known for its crime, drugs, and as the birthplace of the 1968 riots. The older residents would remember the former neighborhood with a mixture of pain and pride -- not unlike the ambivalence found in veterans recalling a war.”

While you would find few if any black people who would want to return to an era of racial segregation, it is clear that by default there were clearly some positive side effects of the policy. One of the best known advocates for black seld determination Marcus Garvey, supported the segregation laws because he said that they were good for black enterprise.

The challenge for the black community now, is to try and rekindle some of the positive spirit that came through solidarity of purpose and to build a strong economic community that owns it’s own means of wealth creation. While the economic gap between whites and blacks is growing, the only hope to redress the balance in the future is to start to control the means of wealth production. Political and social freedom counts for little if a community remains economically repressed.

ECONOMIC SEGREGATION SPLITS WHITE AND BLACK AMERICA

While legal segregation may have ended in 1964 with the passing of the Civil Rights Bill, America is still a nation divided along racial lines. Neighbourhood's are segregated into black and white ones. Schools are now more segregated than they were 20 years ago, and despite advances in the workplace, the top jobs are largely a ‘whites only’ club.

The statistics tell the story:

*African Americans are only about half as likely as whites to complete a bachelor's degree (14 and 28 percent, respectively).

*The black-white unemployment ratio has rarely dipped below two-to-one in the last thirty years.

*Among those employed, only 16 percent of African Americans held professional or managerial jobs in 1997, compared to 31 percent of whites.

*The median income for black families was 55 percent that of white families ($26,522 compared to $47,023 in 1997).

*In this same year, 26 percent of black families lived under the poverty line, whereas only 6 percent of white families did.

Published: 31 August 2008
Issue: 1336

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