AfricanAmerican Entrepreneurs Essay Research Paper AfricanAmerican Entrepreneurship

African-American Entrepreneurs Essay, Research Paper

African-American Entrepreneurship

In a comparative light there seems to be significant problems, or obstacles, for African-American entrepreneurs. These problems are categorized by environmental factors, opportunity factors, and issues related to capital. The purpose of this paper is to provide sociological, and economical insight to the plight of African-American entrepreneurs. There is an effort to trace the development of African-American entrepreneurship throughout American history, in the post-reconstruction era to the present, in relationship to social conditions of discrimination. Uniquely, African-American entrepreneurs are involved in the affirmation of a paradox of American ideology. African-American entrepreneurs, in pursuit of the American dream, have been taught to stress individual success where what is needed is communal solidarity to foster access to the things that they have been categorically denied. A high concentration of African-American entrepreneurs are focused in the service economy. Although these jobs provide viable services and profit for many individuals they are not high profit occupations. This accounts for an African-American presence in entrepreneurship without a high market share. The reasoning for this can partially explained by the Great Migration, a period lasting from 1900-1930 in which millions of African-Americans migrated from the South to Northern cities.1 Upon arrival in the North African-Americans faced entrepreneurial opportunity and already established European communities. With the arrival of these masses of African-Americans came radical changes in the moderate status of race relations in the North. In Cleveland, the influx of African Americans prompted white fears over residential encroachment and occupational competition, resulting in `a sharp rise in racial tensions and an increase in institutional discrimination. 2 This cause a transformation of the services that already existing African-American entrepreneurs were providing. The newly racialized environment now regulated African-American businesses to serving only African-Americans. A practical example of this assertion is found in an examination of the occupation of undertaking. Undertaking was perhaps the most exclusive protected market available to African-American entrepreneurs in the early twentieth century. 3 Due to the changing climate in race relations in Northern cities there were no longer white undertakers who would even touch black bodies. There were also cultural specificities that African-American entrepreneurs engaged in the funeral process had to respect. As a result, African-Americans became over represented in the field of undertaking (Table 1.1) in the years following the Great Migration. Again, it is important to recognize that most opportunities for African-American entrepreneurs were similar to this one in that they were market specific service economy oriented. In short, changes in the ethnic compositions of (N)orthern cities in the early twentieth century made it difficult for African Americans to establish an economic interface in entrepreneurial occupations during the crucial period of their initial migration to these cities. The lack of such an interface may have set African Americans on a course of economic disadvantage for the rest of the twentieth century. 4 An important piece in shaping this model of economic disadvantage is the pervasiveness of white supremacist theory in the dominant society of the time.5 The common belief of the inherent inferiority of blacks limited their entrance into the entrepreneurial economy, even in the North. One economist when speaking of the disadvantage of trying to create an African-American owned business in a white supremacist environment goes further to say that, This disadvantage, moreover, continues to inhibit the entry of African Americans into entrepreneurial occupations. 6 Common historic methodology suggests that there can be no examination of the economic position of African-Americans without relationship to the church. The institution of the church in post-emancipation America is the single most important institution in African-American history. Interestingly enough there is a sect of Christianity that is peculiarly similar to Protestantism, except it is regulated to African-Americans. A Protestant model will be employed in this exposition of the church of Father Divine. The Father Divine Peace Mission Movement was centered in the New York area in the period of the Great Depression. Father Divine and twelve of his angels set up an employment agency in which the angels would hire out their services as domestic workers. Father Divine offered free dinners at his church in which he enlisted members. However, The growth of membership in the Peace Mission Movement during the Depression outstripped Father Divine s capacity to place his converts in domestic employment. Self-employment provided a practical remedy for Divine s supply problem. . . 7 In this respect the Church of Father Divine is similar to Protestantism8 in creating a community with a propensity for entrepreneurship. God was regulated away from the individual, for in the Father Divine s sect he was God. The rationalization of profit maximization was made evident in hymns like, If you love Him [God], get a job and go to work. 9 The Peace Movement was responsible for an African-American entrepre