News that Montgomery police had arrested Rosa Parks on December 1, 1955, for refusing to give up her seat on a bus spread quickly. Within twenty-four hours, leaders of the city’s African American community called a meeting to propose a bus boycott. The next evening, they gathered in Martin Luther King Jr.’s Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. The leaders included small-business owners, lawyers, clergy, teachers, postal workers, and union leaders. Though all agreed on the necessity of a boycott, alternate transportation lingered as the final question of the meeting. The city’s relatively large network of black-owned taxi companies—eighteen companies operating approximately 210 cabs—provided the first solution. Each small taxi business eagerly offered its assistance, lowering its fares so that passengers paid the same as they would to ride the bus, lending critical tactical support to the early days of the boycott.Footnote ¹

But when city authorities learned that this network of small black-owned businesses was providing critical organizational support to the protest, the police began enforcing a minimum-fare law, prohibiting the cabs from offering the same low fare as the buses. But this did not hinder the boycott in the way that white city leaders hoped, because a volunteer car pool replaced the cheap taxi service. And with this solution, too, the assistance of the organizational network of small businesses proved vital. Black pharmacist Richard Harris, the owner of Dean’s Drugstore, worked tirelessly to orchestrate the car pool and offered his drugstore as a makeshift dispatch hub. Although city authorities prohibited one sector of small businesses from supporting the protest, another black-owned business filled the void.Footnote ²

Without the development of car pools and the support of small businesses, the boycott could not have succeeded. Initially, black cabdrivers contributed by driving black workers to their places of employment. The notion of using car pools to lower the expenses of getting to work once the boycott was under way was first deployed in Baton Rouge in 1953. There, “Operation Free Lift,” picked up black workers traveling to and from work at designated locations. In Montgomery, boycott leaders eventually requested from the city the right to set up franchises; that is, a jitney system—not just cars but station wagons. Their request was denied. If allowed, car-pool operators could have charged a fare to help defray expenses. Instead, King and others raised outside funds to assist the owners, whose expenses included gasoline, insurance, and automobile maintenance. Such logistics grew complicated, especially when violence led insurance companies to cancel coverage on the station wagons, forcing King and others to find alternative insurance. Despite such complications, the boycott could not have succeeded without the support of taxi owners or other small-business owners like Richard Harris.Footnote ³

These stories demonstrate that the support of small black-owned businesses helped the Civil Rights movement to succeed in a variety of ways. These enterprises provided an economic infrastructure that contributed to the success of the movement. Unique opportunities derived from time and place shaped small-business owners’ capacity to engage politically. For example, Tiffany M. Gill persuasively showed that the “black beauty industry since its inception has served as an incubator for black women’s political activism and a platform from which to agitate for social and political change.”Footnote ⁴ We expand on this insight to offer a theoretical argument about small businesses generally: They had special characteristics that enabled them to engage in political activity at the local level: local connections, community trust and confidence, employment provisions, and capital to expend in support of community goals. Above all, they had a degree of economic independence. Business owners who engaged in political activity were much more protected from economic retribution than workers who participated in activism. Employers routinely fired activist employees. The relative economic independence of business ownership allowed black business owners, like ministers, to be for the most part immune to the threat of dismissal from white employers.

These characteristics made black business owners powerful supporters of the Civil Rights movement. Despite this support, however, the relationship between business owners and activists within the movement was at times characterized by tension. Activists relied on the support of the business community, but each took a different view of tactics and strategy. Business owners often found the approach of activists to be too radical, whereas activists often found the business owners’ approach to be too conservative. Nevertheless, they needed each other. Each side therefore found ways to compromise in order to work cooperatively toward racial justice.Footnote ⁵

Most black-owned businesses were not “big” businesses of the sort usually studied by business historians. The dominant Chandlerian paradigm in business history traditionally has “contrasted the complexities of ‘modern’ (big) business with the simplicity of ‘traditional’ (small) business,” leading many scholars to study the former.Footnote ⁶ But “small business” remained important long after the “rise of big business” took place at the turn of the twentieth century. While others have shown that small business was not merely “an anachronistic throwback to a preindustrial era” but instead a vibrant component of American economic life, we contend that it also played a powerful political role, not just in the importance of propagating a small-business ideology but in providing logistical and financial support to political activity. This calls into question Richard Hofstadter’s contention that in the twentieth century American small-business owners became “more often than not … a parochial and archaic opponent of liberal ideas, a supporter of vigilante groups and of right wing cranks.”Footnote ⁷ Many writers have defined “small business” in different ways, but some characteristics should be emphasized: It usually was locally owned by a single proprietor or a few partners, served a local market, and hired workers locally.Footnote ⁸ Most importantly, small-business owners very often played a more active role in civic matters than their counterparts in larger firms. The civic participation and support of African American small-business owners for the Civil Rights movement had more profound consequences than many scholars have recognized.Footnote ⁹

In the middle of the twentieth century, small businesses faced harder challenges compared with their larger counterparts. Nevertheless, small businesses could still succeed, according to Mansel Blackford, by “providing a specialty product or service for a niche market.”Footnote ¹⁰ This is what many black-owned businesses did, operating across the South because they provided the goods and services to black customers who could not attain them from white businesses because of segregation. Thomas Boston, a leading writer and researcher on African American business, thinks that scholars may not have realized the importance of black-owned businesses because of their “small size.”Footnote ¹¹ Nevertheless it is important that in the South, black-owned businesses were a significant source of employment for black workers.Footnote ¹² The prevalence of black business ownership increased through the 1940s and 1950s, with the percentage of black males in the “proprietors” occupation grouping rising from 1.2 in 1940 to 6.2 in 1962.Footnote ¹³ This growing community of black-owned businesses in Southern cities in the 1950s and 1960s made a significant contribution to the movement.Footnote ¹⁴ While there were 70,000 black-owned businesses in the United States in 1920, their total more than doubled across the Civil Rights era, so that by 1969 they totaled 163,000 and employed 151,996 people.Footnote ¹⁵ Just under 1,000 of these businesses, totaling 988, were in Birmingham, Alabama, for example, which was a focal point of the Civil Rights movement when Martin Luther King Jr. led nonviolent marchers against the depravity of Bull Connor’s high-pressure water hoses and attack dogs.Footnote ¹⁶

In constant need of donations to fund everything from bail money to lodging to food, the Civil Rights movement depended on black business owners. One magazine estimated that King traveled nearly 780,000 miles per year in the late 1950s as he preached against segregation.Footnote ¹⁷ Even if the estimate is overly generous, it is clear that such wide travel would have necessitated considerable material support. Local businesses played a key role. By the early 1960s, it took “$1000 in hard cash to run the SCLC [Southern Christian Leadership Conference] movement each day,” and churches, businesses, and African American entertainers donated to the cause.Footnote ¹⁸ But Civil Rights leaders could also come into conflict over strategy and goals with black business owners, who favored incremental negotiation over radical tactics.

The tension between Civil Rights activists and their more conservative supporters in the black business community is best illustrated by A. G. Gaston. During the Birmingham integration struggle in 1963, Arthur George Gaston, a black funeral home and motel owner, played a significant role as donor and organizer. Gaston was wealthier and more famous than the other black business owners who supported the movement: A 1976 profile in Black Enterprise described him as a “living legend” who was “president of 10 businesses worth more than $31,000,000.”Footnote ¹⁹ Despite his exceptional status as one of the top black business owners in the country, his involvement encapsulates the tension between the radical and moderate approaches of activists and their supporters.

In 1968, Gaston published a memoir entitled Green Power: The Successful Way of A.G. Gaston. This document illuminates the mind-set of a business leader who both supported—and had reservations about—the aims and tactics of the Civil Rights movement. Gaston depicts himself as a born businessman, even charging his friends a fare to ride his childhood swing set.Footnote ²⁰ Much of the book was devoted to depicting his life as an up-by-his-bootstraps tale in the tradition of Booker T. Washington, who he unsurprisingly cited as an inspiration, writing that his copy of Up from Slavery was “worn from much thumbing.”Footnote ²¹ It might have been the influence of Washington on his thinking that led him into conflict with Civil Rights activists. Even as a young man during World War I, Gaston said, “It’s not color particularly that keeps you from having the full, good life. What you got to have is self-respect and money.”Footnote ²² Throughout his life, Gaston, like his hero Washington, embraced a philosophy of individualism: He thought that one could transcend structural obstacles with hard work and determination, and saw his own wealth as evidence.

After working at a string of poorly paid odd jobs upon returning from World War I, Gaston noticed that African American funerals were often funded through charity rather than insurance, as many insurance companies refused to accept black customers. He devised a burial insurance society to serve this need, which led him into funeral home ownership in Birmingham. According to Suzanne E. Smith, the “funeral industry provided one of the most economically viable careers for the aspiring African American entrepreneur” and “funeral directors were usually among the few black individuals in any town or city who were economically independent and not beholden to the local white power structures.”Footnote ²³ This was also true in the case of the aforementioned case of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, when prominent black funeral director C. W. Lee led the National Negro Funeral Directors Association to support the boycott and Rufus Lewis, who oversaw the largest black funeral home business in the city, organized voter registration.Footnote ²⁴

Despite a failed experiment in owning a bottling plant, Gaston attained such wealth through his funeral business that he could expand into motel ownership in 1954. He then opened a vocational training institute for young African Americans, was invited to dine with President John F. Kennedy, and toured Africa and Europe with his wife, Minnie. Gaston also observed that in Birmingham, African Americans struggled to obtain sufficient mortgage money from white lending institutions and therefore lived in “sub-standard homes” or paid “exorbitant rates of interest.”Footnote ²⁵ Therefore, in 1957 Gaston organized the Citizens Federal Savings and Loan Association. “It became my special joy,” Gaston said, “to drive through the streets of Birmingham and see the better homes being built and purchased by our people.”Footnote ²⁶ He also advanced funds to other black-owned businesses, such as providing over $100,000 to guarantee the opening of the ABC Super Market in Tuskegee.Footnote ²⁷

Such financial support for the African American community of Alabama was nevertheless undergirded by Gaston’s philosophy of individualism, in which hard work could help one overcome structural barriers. A few decades later, however, the vicious violence of Bull Connor outside his office window in Birmingham would force him to reevaluate that philosophy. Seeing the violence transformed Gaston, in the words of his niece, “from a reluctant participant in the rush toward desegregation into a powerful, visible broker of peace in his city.”Footnote ²⁸ It would not be Gaston’s first steps into the struggle for desegregation. In 1961, for example, he led a group known as the Committee of 14, which sought a resolution to the stalemate over desegregating Birmingham’s city pools and parks. Even then, however, the city’s mayor involved Gaston, because he perceived that the businessman would be a conservative influence in the controversy. He also had forced the white-owned First National Bank to remove the “whites only” signs from its drinking fountain by threatening to close his account. But with the coming of violence, Gaston’s support for the African American community would move beyond the individual level to support challenges to the structural underpinnings of racism in Birmingham.

As the movement escalated, so did Gaston’s involvement. When Fred Shuttlesworth founded the Alabama Movement for Human Rights (which eventually became an affiliate of Martin Luther King Jr.’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the SCLC), it held its first meeting in the Smith & Gaston Funeral Home. Shuttlesworth and Gaston believed in different approaches to solving Birmingham’s racism: immediacy versus incremental negotiations. Despite such differences, they needed each other, and sought compromise in pursuit of their ultimately shared aims. “Fred’s the man that’s got the folks,” Gaston told Sidney Smyer, the president of the Birmingham Chamber of Commerce, and the other white leaders who comprised the Senior Citizens Committee, “I got some money, but that’s all. Money don’t run this thing now.”Footnote ²⁹ Likewise, the activists understood why they needed Gaston. “We knew that more than any other man in black business circles,” Ralph Abernathy said, “he could help us establish our credibility in Birmingham.”Footnote ³⁰ Although they sought his support, the activists still found Gaston to be too conservative an influence.

When three hundred attendees came to Birmingham for the annual SCLC convention in 1962, most participants stayed at the A.G. Gaston Motel, and King stayed at the motel, which continued to host SCLC strategy meetings, in early 1963.Footnote ³¹ King and Abernathy used Room Number 30, the motel’s best suite, for strategy sessions and debriefings, but Gaston still charged them for the use of the room. On May 12, the motel was bombed in retaliation. Room 30, King and Abernathy’s headquarters, was targeted in particular, and Gaston also discovered a ticking green box at a mortuary he owned.Footnote ³² Later, in September, his own home was firebombed, and he hired around-the-clock guards. Southern whites targeted Gaston’s businesses with violence, illustrating the way in which some Southerners, recognizing the political and social power of black small-business owners, mobilized to harm such businesses. Amidst the violence, Gaston released a statement, which reveals the tension at the heart of business support for Civil Rights activism: He had provided critical logistical support by hosting the SCLC meetings, but his statement carried the unmistakable conservative voice of a businessman calling for order. “I regret the absence of continued communication between the white and Negro leadership in our city and the inability of the white merchants and power structure of our community to influence the City Fathers to establish an official line of communication between the races in our city,” he said. “I, therefore, call all the citizens of Birmingham,” he continued, “to work harmoniously and together in a spirit of brotherly love to solve the problems of our city.”Footnote ³³ Gaston’s letter enraged King in particular. Gaston thought that some of the movement’s tactics had become too daring and provoked the bombings, leading him into conflict with King and other activists.

King refuted the view of Gaston and other Birmingham moderates by arguing that “the bombing was the result of too little daring in civil rights, not too much.”Footnote ³⁴ Despite Gaston’s material support for King, the relationship between the two men remained strained, as their views on strategy and aims differed significantly. One could interpret part of King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” as a response to Gaston: “You may well ask, ‘Why direct action? Why sit-ins, marches, and so forth. Isn’t negotiation a better path?’ You are quite right in calling for negotiation. Indeed, this is the very purpose of direct action … to create a situation so crisis packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation.”Footnote ³⁵ King understood that the kind of negotiations sought by Gaston would never take place without the tactics that Gaston opposed.

In another statement, Gaston seemed more concerned about the potential economic consequences of the unrest. In a Birmingham newspaper he wrote, “As an employer of a large number of people, whose total earnings are more than a million dollars a year, with several million dollars invested in this area, I feel I am qualified to have a right to be concerned, not only about myself or my businesses, but about the hundreds of employees and their families who are associated with me—as what affects the good name and economy of this community, good or bad, affects all of us who benefit from this community.”Footnote ³⁶ Although Gaston now played a more active role in the struggle for desegregation, Washingtonian individualism still pervaded his thought. Gaston’s moderation stemmed from what he perceived as the material improvements in African American living conditions during his lifetime. In his memoir, for example, he cited the percentage increase in black wages and homeownership. The businessman took a decidedly more material view of the meaning of racial equality than the ministers he supported. “A first class broke man,” he said, “will find it very difficult to use his civil rights to the fullest.”Footnote ³⁷ The activists understood this to be the conservative definition of freedom of a man who had obtained wealth. They sought a different kind of freedom.

Gaston’s bail payments further reveal the tension between the conservative business supporters of the movement and some within the movement’s activist wing. During this period, the Birmingham police arrested many black demonstrators. Gaston guaranteed $160,000 of the bail money; $2,500 of that was used to free Martin Luther King Jr. after he had written his famous “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” King thought that staying in jail would be more effective strategically, but Gaston bailed him out against his will. Gaston saw an upside to paying for King’s release. While King was in jail, he wrote that “more militant splinter groups” had filled the leadership vacuum and that King “was needed to calm and control the colored community,” because Gaston “felt his continued imprisonment would further agitate my people.”Footnote ³⁸ According to Gaston, the more radical activists wanted to “stay in jail until the city decided to release them, boasting that ‘hell’ would have been raised if King’s confinement had continued.”Footnote ³⁹ The attitudes of the businessman and the activists who depended on him for material support were at odds. “It disturbed me,” Gaston continued, “that my people could so mistake my motives … I simply felt that the demonstrators had made their point to the world and there was no need to prolong their suffering by permitting them to remain in jail. I was convinced it was now time to use the conference table instead of the streets to try to settle differences.”Footnote ⁴⁰ “Nothing,” he concluded, “justified disrespect for law and order.”Footnote ⁴¹

The tension between King and Gaston illustrates a broader tension within the Civil Rights movement. Sometimes the more radical strategies and aims of activists and volunteers conflicted with the more conservative character of the business owners who supported their activities. In her legal history of the Civil Rights movement in Atlanta, Tomiko Brown-Nagin identified an approach she calls “pragmatic civil rights.” This referred to an approach practiced by black Atlanta’s leadership that often deviated at the local level from the national strategy of the NAACP. Brown-Nagin writes that this pragmatism, among other characteristics, “placed a high value on economic security” as “leaders sought to preserve the economic self-sufficiency that black elites had achieved under Jim Crow, expand black political influence, and preserve personal autonomy.”Footnote ⁴² For example, A. T. Walden, the president of the Atlanta branch of the NAACP who personified pragmatic civil rights and whom the Ku Klux Klan once wanted dead because of his work for racial equality, was skeptical of direct action in the 1960s and was therefore called an “Uncle Tom” by a new generation of activists. In the 1960s, Birmingham activists called A. G. Gaston the same thing. As wary as Gaston might have been of direct action, his own actions made direct contributions to the movement for racial economic equality. For example, when he was approached in the 1960s by a prominent white businessman who sought funds for the Birmingham Symphony, Gaston agreed to donate $2,000. This, however, was on the condition that the businessman provide more opportunities for his black workers.Footnote ⁴³ How much of a parallel was there between the role and ideology of the Atlanta lawyer Walden and the role and ideology of the Birmingham business owner Gaston? This possible parallel raises the question of whether the “pragmatic civil rights” framework in the legal history of the movement had a corollary in the economic history of the movement.

If one extends this framework even further, the black middle class and black elite were not the only ones to act pragmatically: Activists too fashioned their own sort of civil rights pragmatism that tried to reconcile the need for radical direct action with the need for the material support of often more conservative black business owners. This led Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) organizers to try to find common ground with the business owners whose support they needed upon entering new Mississippi towns. In one case, the activists prepared for such tension through a role-playing exercise in which participants pretended to seek out the support of a local business owner. The exercise instructed participants to assume the businessman “is pretending to be friendly, then they are to assume that the businessman is unwilling to share power with young upstarts, and finally they are to assume that the businessman is sincerely committed to the movement but thinks SNCC people are working for personal glory.”Footnote ⁴⁴ The exercise sought to resolve this problem by encouraging trainees “to think about not only overcoming fear but also neutralizing deception, distrust, and arrogance while avoiding pigeonholing people stereotypically.”Footnote ⁴⁵ A successful alliance between activists and business owners demanded compromise and cooperation to overcome potential conflicts. And sometimes circumstances pushed more conservative figures to take a more radical stand, such as when thirteen black businessmen and ministers who previously had been reluctant to march held a protest march in 1963 in Jackson, Mississippi, and were arrested.Footnote ⁴⁶

Despite King’s sometimes conflicted relationship with black business owners, he promoted African American economic activity. In order for large-scale reform to succeed, King thought that African Americans needed to consolidate and employ their economic power. According to Mehrsa Baradaran, he advocated black banking as an important component of nonviolent resistance. This entailed, in King’s words, “the development of financial institutions which were controlled by Negroes and which were sensitive to the problems of economic deprivation of the Negro community.”Footnote ⁴⁷ In his last speech, King said, “We’ve got to strengthen black institutions. I call upon you to take your money out of the banks downtown and deposit your money in Tri-State Bank. We want a ‘bank-in’ movement in Memphis … You have six or seven black insurance companies here in the city of Memphis. Take out your insurance there. We want to have an ‘insurance-in.’”Footnote ⁴⁸ Although he articulated it differently, Malcolm X also recognized the importance of black economic institutions. “Why,” he asked, “should white people be running the banks of our community?”Footnote ⁴⁹

King’s promotion of black economic activity makes even more sense when we remember that not all black businesspeople were as conservative as A. G. Gaston. Examples from the Civil Rights movement in Mississippi illustrate the important role played by local small businesses and the opposition it provoked. Scholars have highlighted the importance of established organizations, such as black colleges, local NAACP chapters, and black churches, but black business owners and black farmers played important roles too.Footnote ⁵⁰ Take, for example, T. R. M. Howard, a wealthy entrepreneur and surgeon who supported other businesses financially in Mississippi. According to David T. Beito and Linda Royster Beito, Howard’s approach wove together pragmatism and radicalism.Footnote ⁵¹ Howard helped fund the development of the movement, and from 1952 to 1955, he organized annual Civil Rights rallies that sometimes drew thousands. In addition to organizing boycotts against white businesses, Howard founded the Regional Council of Negro Leadership to spread a message of self-help, mutual aid, thrift, and equal political rights. Through this organization he also mentored another black business owner who supported the Civil Rights movement: Amzie Moore.

Mississippi gas station owner Amzie Moore understood that as a small-business owner he was uniquely empowered to engage in civic participation. He used his position in the community as a springboard for his voter-registration efforts, provoking a concerted campaign on the part of whites to strangle his business that was so intense that it drew the attention of J. Edgar Hoover in 1956. For example, local banks refused to provide the credit Moore needed for operational costs, because he refused to put a “For Colored Only” sign on his building.Footnote ⁵² He also endured frequent threats, and in 1964 a reporter noted that Moore would receive three calls threatening his life in an evening.Footnote ⁵³ Moore developed a relationship with the prominent Civil Rights activist Bob Moses when Moses was recruiting SNCC volunteers from Mississippi. But Moore flipped the recruitment drive on its head. Moore felt that, while it was fine for SNCC to recruit young people from Mississippi as it was doing, it would be even better if SNCC sent students into Mississippi to register voters.Footnote ⁵⁴ Moore’s position in the community as the owner of a gas station also enabled him to assist with logistics, such as transportation for the volunteers. Moore even presented his proposal for SNCC students to assist voter registration to the SNCC conference and hosted meetings of leaders of the voter-registration drive at his home in Cleveland, Mississippi.Footnote ⁵⁵ Another example is Daniel Speed, who owned a black grocery store in Tallahassee, Florida. Speed provided the funding for a bus boycott similar to the one in Montgomery, and the grocery store served, like Moore’s house, as a meeting point for black leaders.Footnote ⁵⁶

In the Mississippi Civil Rights struggle, black business owners were on the front lines, enduring pressure from the white community. In addition to preaching at four different congregations, Reverend George Lee ran a prosperous printing business and a grocery store, positioning him as a prominent leader in the black community in Belzoni, Mississippi.Footnote ⁵⁷ He was the first African American in Humphreys County to get his name on the voting list and organized the Belzoni branch of the NAACP in 1953 along with his friend Gus Courts, another grocery store owner. Lee and Courts registered hundreds of black voters in a county where no black person had voted since Reconstruction. In 1955, after regularly receiving telephone threats that said, “You’re number one on a list of people we don’t need around here anymore,” Lee was shot and killed while returning from picking up his preaching suit at the dry cleaners.Footnote ⁵⁸ The investigating sheriff dismissed the death as merely an automobile accident and said the lead pellets lodged in what remained of his jaw were just dental fillings. Gus Courts then endured threats that wholesalers would not deliver goods to his grocery store, and a local bank refused to do business with him unless he handed over NAACP records.Footnote ⁵⁹ But this did not deter Courts. Despite threats that he would face a similar fate as Lee, he continued to push for voter registration. In response, white-owned gas stations stopped selling gas to him. Recognizing the power of black-owned enterprise, Courts started pooling money within the black community so that it could purchase its own gas station. After refusing to remove his name from the voter-registration list, Courts was shot twice while standing inside his store, but survived.Footnote ⁶⁰

“The economic pressure that Gus Courts was subjected to,” Charles M. Payne writes, “was common across the state, much of it orchestrated by the Citizens’ Councils.”Footnote ⁶¹ But the way in which whites turned to violence after African Americans endured such economic pressure reveals “the forcefulness of Black activism.”Footnote ⁶² Mississippi police also harassed black business owners, such as the cabdrivers who had their permits revoked and operations halted.Footnote ⁶³ Consider the example of black small-business owner George Washington, who refused to stop supporting the movement. This led a local oil supplier to remove the pumps at his gasoline station and distributors to refuse to deliver groceries to his store. Then, his property was bombed and police arrested Washington for “failing to report the bombing.”Footnote ⁶⁴ Mississippi’s black community developed effective measures to counter such economic pressure thanks to the power of black-owned enterprise. In response to the economic reprisals conducted by the Citizens’ Councils, the national office of the NAACP established a war chest at the black-owned Tri-State Bank of Memphis, with funds that could be lent to Mississippi activists to forestall the possibility of them losing their homes, farms, or businesses.Footnote ⁶⁵

Furthermore some organizations recognized the importance of a strong and stable community of black-owned businesses. The Delta Ministry of Mississippi promoted a “development” community called “Freedom City” that attempted to develop small-scale enterprises to produce furniture and candy cooperatives with instruction in running cooperative businesses.Footnote ⁶⁶ Black-owned businesses were a politically charged point of conflict in the Mississippi Civil Rights movement. In Grenada in 1966, the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission blocked the construction of a black-run grocery store. In response the SCLC organized a boycott against white business owners and a group of black Grenadans “formed B&P (Business and Professional) Enterprises in order to establish a locally owned grocery store that would keep money in Grenada’s black community.”Footnote ⁶⁷ Nevertheless the Sovereignty Commission thwarted this fledgling enterprise through lawsuits. “The failure of B&P Enterprises to establish a community-owned grocery store,” Joseph Crespino concludes, “was no small loss for black Grenada. With school and voting rights fights increasingly relegated to the courts, a community-owned grocery store might have provided a source of economic self-sufficiency and community focus.”Footnote ⁶⁸

While in situations such as Montgomery black business owners provided organizational and material support for protests, in other cities black business owners played prominent political roles. This was the case in Birmingham, Alabama. Amid racial tensions in 1950, some business and community leaders organized an Interracial Committee to address social problems affecting the city’s African American population. This committee consisted of twenty-five black members and twenty-five white members, with a black executive director. Three black businessmen served on the committee: a co-owner of a realty company, an owner of a funeral home, and a manger of an insurance office. But despite the presence of these black business owners, an imbalance also reflects how black businesspeople could struggle to influence local politics in an institutional way, because in contrast to the three black businessmen there were fourteen white business executives. These white business executives had “greater access to the centers of power in Birmingham and thus could more easily control the priorities and activities of the Interracial Committee.”Footnote ⁶⁹

Although small businesses might not have been able to achieve economies of scale, sell to national markets, or employ considerable numbers, focusing on such economic indicators obscures an important side effect of small-business ownership: Small-business owners were powerfully situated for prominent civic roles. Andrew Brimmer, the first black member of the Federal Reserve Board, recognized this. Although his thoughts regarding this were somewhat contradictory, he elegantly articulated the small-business owner’s capacity for civic engagement in 1968, writing, “The owner was a community leader. He had an opportunity to share in the development of programs in his community; he could lead a protest movement; he could occasionally deal with his white counterpart—he was in a position to do so.”Footnote ⁷⁰ Many observers have missed this point, because they focus solely on conventional economic indicators, rather than exploring the political and social consequences of business ownership. For example, a 1971 research report from the Conference Board decried the fact that “black business is disproportionately restricted to small service establishments.”Footnote ⁷¹ Yet in the same report, the researchers observed that a small black-owned business engaged in the manufacturing of transformers and metal stampings in Rochester, New York, was “a symbol of hope to disadvantaged minority groups in Rochester and an effective power base for FIGHT [a black community organization].”Footnote ⁷²

Regardless of the conclusions of such economic indicators, the 1960s began what Joshua Clark Davis has called a period of “activist entrepreneurs” who “conceived of their storefronts as political places.”Footnote ⁷³ A significant sector of such activist business owners were restaurateurs. “Food,” according to Dave Hoekstra, “is often an overlooked cord of the civil rights movement” and “an unheralded number of women chefs, workers, and small business owners … energized the movement.”Footnote ⁷⁴ The restaurant provided a physical space to meet, organize, and rest. Chef Leah Chase operated the Dooky Chase restaurant in New Orleans, which became a hub for Civil Rights activists. Her food energized Martin Luther King Jr., the Freedom Riders, and voter-registration drive organizers. The restaurant’s rooms also hosted meetings for activists, and like other black business involved in the political activism, endured physical violence when a pipe bomb was thrown through its front window. “Deep down,” Chase reflected, “I feel in some ways this restaurant really changed the course of America. This was a safe haven for all of us. We fed everybody. We had an upstairs dining room where people met.”Footnote ⁷⁵ Similarly, in Atlanta, activists often met and ate at Paschal’s Restaurant, whose owners also sometimes paid to bail activists out of jail.Footnote ⁷⁶

Recent critics also have begun to cast doubt on the efficacy of protest.Footnote ⁷⁷ The Civil Rights movement, however, powerfully counters such doubts, serving as the most powerful example of the possibilities of effective protest. What made the Civil Rights movement such a uniquely effective protest movement? In her recent work Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest, sociologist Zeynep Tufekci argues that successful movements are proto-institutional, characterized by a high degree of organization and strategic flexibility guided by management structures.Footnote ⁷⁸ Tufecki, however, omits why this is significant in relation to the Civil Rights movement: Organization, strategic planning, and structured management sounds precisely like the skill set of a small businessperson, and this further illustrates why the involvement and leadership of small-business owners was critically important to the success of the Civil Rights movement. “What gets lost in popular accounts of the civil rights movement,” Tufekci writes, “is the meticulous and lengthy organizing work sustained over a long period that was essential for every protest action.”Footnote ⁷⁹ But she does not focus on the crucial role that black small-business owners played in that organizing work. She credits the private car-pool network and “church groups, women’s groups, and labor unions” with building the foundation for the Montgomery bus boycott, but does not mention the network of black-owned taxis that preceded the car pool or Richard Harris’s pharmacy, which acted as the car-pool dispatch center.Footnote ⁸⁰

In the end, the story of black business is about more than just economics. Black business owners were powerful figures who played an indispensable role in supporting the Civil Rights movement. They provided not just shelter and food, but also a knack for organizational planning and experience with complex logistics, without which a protest movement cannot succeed. Small-business owners could leverage their local connections, trust, and reputation to forward political aims, while also having the ability to act without the fear of dismissal from employment, as they were self-employed. Therefore, from DC to Alabama and from Mississippi to New York, black business owners did the behind-the-scenes work to lay the foundation for the movement’s famous leaders to do their work. Nevertheless the movement’s activists and its supporters in the business community often had divergent ideological and practical aims, producing an internal tension. Each side, dependent on the other to accomplish its aims despite differing tactics, found ways to reconcile differences in a way that can fruitfully be understood as another form of “civil rights pragmatism,” which has been well-described in the movement’s legal history. The extension of this framework from legal history to economic and business history raises new questions about class dynamics and tensions within the movement that hold promising avenues for future research by scholars of the movement. The black business owners who were uniquely situated to engage civically and support the Civil Rights movement also parted the waters and deserve history’s equal attention.