Research Projects - [ Black Entrepreneurship in Mississippi/America ]
When looking at African Americans in the post-Civil War South and into the 20th-century, scholars have focused on the gains blacks made during the Reconstruction Period, and the subsequent regression that evolved into the social, economic, and political system known as Jim Crow. They have examined such economic and political elements as sharecropping, the violence of the Ku Klux Klan, black leadership and agency, and cultural elements of black-life such as the Harlem Renaissance.
But these studies do not tell the full story of African-American life and culture. Although a numerical minority in the United States, many blacks managed to break away from the limiting sharecropping-experience to carve out an independent existence within the confining world created under Jim Crow.
This project, entitled Black Entrepreneurship in the Deep South, will attempt to document the well-known but often forgotten experience of black people in business. The term "entrepreneurship" is being used in its broadest sense. This project defines entrepreneurship to mean any vocation by which an African American man or woman stood totally or somewhat independent of white control between 1865 and 1960. This expanded classification would include occupations ranging from physician to merchant, journalist to banker, and from independent farmer to a baseball player in the Negro Leagues.
In this work, biography serves as the main vehicle for demonstrating the entrepreneurial spirit of African Americans. From primary and secondary sources, this study seeks to build an archive detailing the lives of African American men women who refused to be marginalized and dehumanized by the Jim Crow system. While they did not always succeed in triumphing over racial segregation, they demonstrated their self confidence and dignity through their many vocational pursuits, leading to a degree of economic and social autonomy in the segregated South.
Scholars, researchers, and other interested parties are invited to assist with this project by sending us any sources of information about African Americans who fit these parameters. This would include photographs, diaries, newspaper articles, personal memoirs, biographies and manuscript collections. We are also seeking research associates who are interested in working on this project.