Building the Black Metropolis: African American Entrepreneurship in Chicago
Building the Black Metropolis: African American Entrepreneurship in Chicago
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Abstract
This book examines the entrepreneurial experiences of and contributions by African American entrepreneurs in Chicago. Through a careful examination of black business activity in areas such as finance, media, and the underground economy known as “Policy,” this work illuminates the manner in which blacks in Chicago built a network of competing and cooperative enterprises and a culture of entrepreneurship unique to the city. This network lay at the center of black business development in Chicago as it allowed blacks there greater opportunity to fund and build businesses reliant on other blacks rather than those whose interests lay outside the black community. Further, it examines how blacks’ business enterprises challenged and changed the economic and political culture of the city to help fashion black communities on Chicago’s South and West sides. For much of the 20th century, Chicago was considered the single best demonstration of blacks’ entrepreneurial potential. From the time the city was founded by black entrepreneur Jean Baptiste DuSable and throughout the 20th century, business enterprises have been part black community life. From DuSable through black business titans like John H. Johnson, Oprah Winfrey, and Anthony Overton black entrepreneurs called the city home and built their empires there. How they did so and the impact of their success (and failure) is a key theme within this book. Additionally, this work analyzes how blacks in Chicago built their enterprises at the same time grappling with the major cultural, political, and economic shifts in America in the 19th and 20th century.
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Front Matter
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Introduction
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1
Early Black Chicago Entrepreneurial and Business Activities from the Frontier Era to the Great Migration: The Nexus of Circumstance and Initiative
Christopher Robert Reed
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2
Robert Sengstacke Abbott, 1868–1940
Myiti Sengstacke Rice
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3
The Rise and Fall of Jesse Binga, a Black Chicago Financial Wizard
Robert Howard
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4
Contested Terrain: P. W. Chavers, Anthony Overton, and the Founding of the Douglass National Bank
Robert E. Weems
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5
King of Selling: The Rise and Fall of S. B. Fuller
Clovis E. Semmes
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6
A Master Strategist: John H. Johnson and the Development of Chicago as a Center for Black Business Enterprise
Jason P. Chambers
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7
Jim Crow Organized Crime: Black Chicago’s Underground Economy in the Twentieth Century
Will Cooley
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8
The Politics of the Drive-Thru Window: Chicago’s Black McDonald’s Operators and the Demands of Community
Marcia Chatelain
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9
Positive Realism: Tom Burrell and the Development of Chicago as a Center for Black-O wned Advertising Agencies
Jason P. Chambers
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10
Oprah Winfrey: The Tycoon
Juliet E. K. Walker
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11
Racial Desegregation and Black Chicago Business: The Case Studies of the Supreme Liberty Life Insurance Company and the Chicago Metropolitan Assurance Company
Robert E. Weems
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End Matter
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