Building the black metropolis : African American entrepreneurship in Chicago / edited by Robert E. Weems Jr. and Jason P. Chambers.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Weems, Robert E., 1951- editor.

Chambers, Jason, editor.

Series:

New Black studies series.

The new black studies series

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

African American businesspeople--Illinois--Chicago--History.

African American businesspeople.

African American business enterprises--Illinois--Chicago--History.

African American business enterprises.

Entrepreneurship--Illinois--Chicago--History.

Entrepreneurship.

African Americans--Illinois--Chicago--Economic conditions.

African Americans.

African Americans--Illinois--Chicago--Social conditions.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (263 pages).

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Urbana : University of Illinois Press, [2017]

Summary:

From Jean Baptiste Point DuSable to Oprah Winfrey, black entrepreneurship has helped define Chicago. Robert E. Weems Jr. and Jason P. Chambers curate a collection of essays that place the city as the center of the black business world in the United States. Ranging from titans like Anthony Overton and Jesse Binga to McDonald's operators to black organized crime, the scholars shed light on the long-overlooked history of African American work and entrepreneurship since the Great Migration. Together they examine how factors like the influx of southern migrants and the city's unique segregation patterns made Chicago a prolific incubator of productive business development-and made building a black metropolis as much a necessity as an opportunity. Contributors: Jason P. Chambers, Marcia Chatelain, Will Cooley, Robert Howard, Christopher Robert Reed, Myiti Sengstacke Rice, Clovis E. Semmes, Juliet E. K. Walker, and Robert E. Weems Jr.

Contents:

Cover

Title

Copyright

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. Early Black Chicago Entrepreneurial and Business Activities from the Frontier Era to the Great Migration: The Nexus of Circumstance and Initiative

2. Robert Sengstacke Abbott, 1868-1940

3. The Rise and Fall of Jesse Binga, a Black Chicago Financial Wizard

4. Contested Terrain: P. W. Chavers, Anthony Overton, and the Founding of the Douglass National Bank

5. King of Selling: The Rise and Fall of S. B. Fuller

6. A Master Strategist: John H. Johnson and the Development of Chicago as a Center for Black Business Enterprise

7. Jim Crow Organized Crime: Black Chicago's Underground Economy in the Twentieth Century

8. The Politics of the Drive-Thru Window: Chicago's Black McDonald's Operators and the Demands of Community

9. Positive Realism: Tom Burrell and the Development of Chicago as a Center for Black-Owned Advertising Agencies

10. Oprah Winfrey: The Tycoon

11. Racial Desegregation and Black Chicago Business: The Case Studies of the Supreme Liberty Life Insurance Company and the Chicago Metropolitan Assurance Company

Contributors

Index.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

0-252-05002-9

OCLC:

986788623