Lending a Hand: How Small Black Businesses Supported the Civil Rights Movement

Louis Ferleger () and Matthew Lavallee
Additional contact information
Louis Ferleger: Boston University
Matthew Lavallee: Boston University

No 67, Working Papers Series from Institute for New Economic Thinking

Abstract: A large literature has detailed the seminal roles played in the Civil Rights Movement by activists, new political organizations, churches, and philanthropies. But black-owned businesses also provided a behind-the-scenes foundation for the movements success. Many black-owned businesses operated across the South because they provided goods and services to black customers who could not attain them from white businesses because of segregation. These small business owners very often played roles in civic matters that their counterparts in larger firms did not. Their civic participation and support contributed far more to the potential for political progress than scholars have recognized. Some accounts of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, for example, underestimate the significance of the role played by Montgomery`s community of black-owned businesses, from taxis to pharmacies. Examples from the Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi also illustrate the importance of local small businesses: black business owners were on the front lines, resisting strong pressures from the white community. This paper analyzes these episodes and places them in the context of black-owned businesses in the United States in the 1950s and 1960s, albeit descriptively given the unevenness and unavailability of standardized statistics. It also traces the debates over Black Capitalism and how the decline of segregation led to dramatic reorganizations of black businesses.

Keywords: American Political Economy; Black Capitalism; Civil Rights Movement; Small Businesses; African American Businesses; Civic Participation; Martin Luther King; Jr.; Andrew Brimmer (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: A13 A14 B15 B52 D29 D72 G18 G21 J15 J48 L11 L21 N12 N82 N92 P48 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 47 pages
Date: 2017-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-ent, nep-his, nep-hme and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Published

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.ineteconomics.org/uploads/papers/WP_67-Ferleger-King.pdf (application/pdf)
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3125212 First version, 2017 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:thk:wpaper:67

DOI: 10.2139/ssrn.3125212

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers Series from Institute for New Economic Thinking Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Pia Malaney ().