"Agents of Survival and Resistance: The Entrepreneurial Impact of African American Female Street Vendors in 19th-Century Charleston"

This paper examines the entrepreneurial legacy of female African American street vendors in 19th-century Charleston, SC, highlighting how they leveraged their economic importance to the city’s food distribution to assert agency within the oppressive socioeconomic system of U.S. Slavery. While there are isolated stories of individual accomplishments, such as manumission and property accumulation, the true strength of these women lies in their collective actions and community networks that not only enabled their survival but also provided opportunities for small acts of resistance among the city’s free and enslaved communities. Unlike their plantation counterparts, urban street vendors in the slave-hire system often lived separately from their enslavers, creating an inescapable tension for White Charlestonians between maximizing enslaver profits and upholding the social and racial hierarchy. As this paper demonstrates, the push-pull between economic interests and social control allowed the African American vending community to skillfully negotiate their place in society.
To best uncover the nuance of this dynamic, this paper seeks to pierce through archival silences surrounding women and slavery by drawing from an array of sources, including historical newspapers, traveler accounts, artwork, and city documents, to reconstruct a narrative of survival and community-driven agency. This paper reclaims the title of entrepreneur in honor of the ingenuity and resilience these women embodied as they defied whiteness and patriarchy to carve out a lasting economic legacy. More than just inspiring, these stories offer a historical foundation for contemporary discussions on the importance of community-building in Black entrepreneurship.