Black companies had been important to facilitating the Nice Migration of African People out of the South between the 1910s and Sixties. But, the standard narrative of the migration as a motion of laborers searching for high-wage jobs obscures the historical past of African People who moved north or west searching for entrepreneurial alternatives.
This story is featured in my ebook, “Freedom Enterprise: Black Entrepreneurship and Racial Capitalism in Detroit,” which might be printed April 8, 2025.
Between 1910 and 1970, greater than 6 million African People left the South for locations similar to Detroit, Chicago, New York and Los Angeles. This mass exodus had, and continues to have, huge political, cultural and social implications for our nation. Migrants had been searching for true freedom, together with full political and financial citizenship – issues they’d not been in a position to obtain within the Jim Crow South.
As a historian of Black enterprise, I wished to know extra about those that migrated to Detroit with the intention of working for themselves – versus getting a job in Henry Ford’s auto factories.
The experiences and trajectories of those migrant entrepreneurs can inform us a lot concerning the prospects for Black social and financial development by means of enterprise in the USA.
Leaving the South
Pioneering African American historian Carter G. Woodson, father of Black Historical past Month, pointed to the shortage of enterprise alternatives in describing the causes of the mass migration that started within the mid-1910s.
“In most parts of the South the Negroes are still unable to become landowners or successful business men,” Woodson wrote in 1918. “Conditions and customs have reserved these spheres for the whites.”
After all, African People did set up companies within the South, generally changing into fairly rich. However there was at all times the specter of lynchings and different types of racial violence for individuals who defied the racial caste system of Jim Crow. The destruction of “Black Wall Street” in Tulsa, Oklahoma, is a widely known story. However there have been many different incidents of white supremacist terrorism concentrating on Black companies homeowners.
In actual fact, many Black entrepreneurs identified that the hazard of racial violence was a deciding issue of their shifting to Detroit. This included folks similar to Willis Eugene Smith, who established a funeral house, and Berry Gordy Sr., who operated a grocery retailer and contracting enterprise within the metropolis. In his 1979 memoir, “Movin’ Up: Pop Gordy Tells His Story,” Gordy advised how he determined to go away Georgia for Detroit after native whites started pestering him about a big examine he obtained as fee for items he had offered. Gordy’s sister warned him: “You fool ’round here, they’re liable to beat us out of it, take all our money.”
Many African American entrepreneurs who participated within the Nice Migration questioned whether or not they might expertise enduring upward mobility by means of enterprise in the event that they stayed within the South.
As early as 1917, the director of the Detroit City League, Forrester B. Washington, reported “receiving many letters from [southern] Negro business men asking information regarding the real situation here.”
Migrant entrepreneurs’ providers important
A lot of these Southern entrepreneurs determined to maneuver north. Detroit’s African American inhabitants elevated 611% between 1910 and 1920 to 40,838, making it house to one of many largest populations of African People within the nation.
Whereas Southern migrants noticed Detroit as a promised land, segregation within the North was alive and effectively. There have been many unfavorable features to racial segregation, however it additionally created entrepreneurial alternatives, as Black newcomers wanted the providers of Black-owned companies similar to barbershops and hair salons, motels and eating places. These companies sustained the rising African American neighborhood and made it possible for Southern migrants to settle completely within the metropolis. By 1926, 85% of Detroit’s Black inhabitants had been migrants, in line with “The Negro in Detroit,” a report produced by the Detroit Bureau of Governmental Analysis.
Some companies made their Southern roots express of their promoting. A 1933 commercial for the Creole Hand Laundry, situated at 542 Watson St., acknowledged: “From New Orleans, La.”
Migrant entrepreneurs tapped into newly created area of interest markets, catering to the tastes of Southern transplants. For instance, the Residence Milling Firm was established in Detroit round 1922 and processed hominy grits, cornmeal and entire wheat flour in a plant at Catherine and Russell streets. Residence Milling’s managers had plans to increase the enterprise to be able to provide Black-owned bakeries in Detroit and satiate the tastes of newcomers.
“There is quite a large demand of the products on the part of Southern residents in the City and the concern is doing a fair volume of business,” acknowledged the 1926 “The Negro in Detroit” report. “Their cornmeal is made from specially selected white corn out of deference to the palate of Southern Negroes who do not relish meal made from yellow corn.”
Supreme Linen and Laundry was one other firm that supplied important items and providers to Detroit’s rising variety of Black-owned eating places and motels. Established by native Mississippians Fred and Callie Allen in 1929, the corporate equipped uniforms, tablecloths and napkins to companies throughout the town and housed a business laundry.
Fred and Callie Allen, a husband and spouse workforce, constructed up their laundry enterprise, Supreme Linen and Laundry, to service the Black neighborhoods close by. The enterprise grew to at the least 41 Black staff.
The Detroit Tribune, CC BY-ND
A mecca for Black-owned enterprise
By the Nineteen Forties, Detroit had earned the fame of getting extra Black-owned companies than every other metropolis in the USA. This thriving enterprise neighborhood comprised primarily Southern migrants.
Black enterprise ladies, significantly these affiliated with the Detroit Housewives’ League, had been instrumental in facilitating the expansion of the Black-owned enterprise neighborhood within the Thirties and Nineteen Forties. The league was established with the objective of boosting Black enterprise within the metropolis and grew to have over 10,000 members. The group promoted Black companies by internet hosting annual exhibitions, producing and distributing informational publications, and sponsoring academic packages for entrepreneurs and customers.
Constructing a profitable Black enterprise neighborhood in Detroit within the first half of the twentieth century was actually not with out obstacles. These included retail and residential segregation, lending discrimination and violence, amongst others. But, migrant entrepreneurs facilitated the migration to the town and reworked the panorama of Detroit.
In 1925, the town’s Black inhabitants was 85,000. That blossomed to 300,000 by 1950.
Detroit’s historic Black enterprise neighborhood was concentrated in adjoining neighborhoods known as Black Backside and Paradise Valley.
Later, this space was focused by city planning initiatives, together with freeway building and concrete renewal within the Fifties and Sixties. In consequence, the success of this enterprise neighborhood was minimize brief. State-sponsored redevelopment worn out a lot of the wealth Black entrepreneurs hoped to move all the way down to their youngsters, contributing to the racial wealth hole.
This destruction was a harsh blow to Southern migrant entrepreneurs who had relocated to Detroit searching for financial independence, upward mobility and different markers of freedom.
