Black Consumers, Black Entrepreneurs, and Economic Justice in the Twentieth-Century United States

This panel examines the diverse ways that African American business owners and community leaders, market researchers, and Black consumers have envisioned the role of Black consumers and Black entrepreneurs in the twentieth century. Together the papers show how a variety of capitalist and anti-capitalist discourses—including economic Black Nationalism, communism, and ideologies of uplift and racial respectability—shaped African Americans’ pursuit of racial and economic equality. Covering the late nineteenth century through the Civil Rights Era, Ronny Regev draws upon the Black press and records of the National Negro Business League and the U.S. Commerce Department to examine changing ideas about what Black consumers and Black proprietors owed each other and how these ideas in turn influenced commercial behavior. Kendra Boyd analyzes why some Black entrepreneurs during the Depression-ridden 1930s embraced communism as the superior route to economic and racial equality. She sets out to explain the conundrum of Dr. Aaron C. Toodle, a successful entrepreneur who operated several drug stores in Detroit as well as the city’s first Black-owned cemetery yet supported communism, an economic system seemingly antagonistic to his interests as a private business owner. Moving to the post-World War II period, Lisa Jacobson explores why American brewers and market researchers often overlooked and misread the Black consumer market and how respectability politics and demands for economic justice shaped Black consumers’ responses to beer marketing in the 1940s and 1950s. Drawing upon Ernest Dichter’s marketing research studies, she shows how Black consumers attempted to leverage their brand loyalty, with varying degrees of success, for more equitable cultural representation and treatment in the economic marketplace.