Schism in African-American Community Development
African-American economic/community development has its own distinctive path within both mainstream economic development and community development. There are many reasons for this, but the central role played by African-Americans in our economic development history—and their position in American history, society, economics and demographics—warrants this focus. African-Americans can sail on either the Privatist or the Progressivist ship, but the evolution of their political culture appears to have been dramatically shaped by the Great Migration and the experience of Big City ghettos. This first discussion takes us to the first decades of the twentieth century, when a schism within African-American economic development occurred. The outcome of that schism as it played out over the twentieth century has led to our lodging African-American economic development in community development. It didn’t start out there, however.
The “mainstream” economic development path came first, with the writings, thought and organizations created by Booker T. Washington. Washington was America’s most influential black intellectual and leader between 1890 and 1915 (when he died). Washington served as political advisor to both Teddy Roosevelt and William Howard Taft. He founded the National Business League, which was the precursor of black chambers of commerce. As “the first national black spokesmen for economic ‘selfdevelopment’ … [he advocated] ‘black capitalism’ [small business] in the belief that whites would accept blacks as equals only after the latter developed experience and expertise in orthodox business practice” (Harrison, 1974, p. 2). Washington’s ultimate goal was to develop an African-American economic development path that ended in the same place ethnic immigrants were moving toward: “assimilation” of blacks into mainstream American economy. This path can be labeled as “integrationist.”
In 1895 Washington negotiated the famous “Atlanta Compromise” calling for individual self-help, a black-relevant version of Horatio Alger that stressed “industry, thrift, intelligence and property” (his words). For him, education and entrepreneurship was a surer (and safer) path for blacks than challenging either Jim Crow laws or seeking political/civil rights. Washington, born a slave, may (or may not) have reflected the 95 percent of American blacks who pre-Great Migration lived in the South. His long-term goal was to facilitate African-American entry into the American economic mainstream. Once lodged in that mainstream African-Americans could eliminate social inequality and attain civil rights.
Washington, in 1901, formally incorporated and assumed the presidency of a newly formed National Negro Business League. The idea for the league originally may have come from W.E.B Du Bois (then teaching at nearby all-Black Atlanta University). At an 1899 conference, Du Bois presented a report on Negro businesses advocating “Negro Business Men’s Leagues … in every town and hamlet” (Mead, 2014, pp. 152–3). Washington may have appropriated Du Bois’s idea, founding the League “to promote the commercial, agricultural, educational and industrial advancement of AfricanAmericans.”6 By 1907, 320 Negro Business Leagues had been formed nationwide (Woodward, 1981, p. 366). These leagues allowed African-American businesses to network with white businesses, and membership included not only African-American businessmen but also professionals, academics and even farmers. They are the forerunner of African-American chambers of commerce.
Washington’s rival was fellow Negro Business League founding board member, W.E.B. Du Bois. Du Bois, born and raised in Great Barrington Massachusetts, was the first African-American to be awarded a doctorate (Harvard). At this time he taught history, sociology and economics at Atlanta University. Du Bois initially worked within the confines of the Atlanta Compromise until 1905, when he co-led the famous Niagara Movement that demanded political and civil rights first and above all. In 1909 he co-founded the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) to serve as the vehicle for that change. Washington opposed Du Bois, and a bitter and divisive series of actions and exchanges cemented a network of competing organizations offering a different path for African-American political and economic development.
Over the following decades Du Bois developed and promoted his approach to community/economic development, which included black separation, mutual cooperation, workers’ control and economic planning. A near lifelong member of the American Socialist Party, he called his approach “socialism without nationalism,” advocating “Negro cooperative stores [that] would obtain their goods from Negro producers, which would be supplied raw materials from Negro farmers. Intermediate stages of production such as extractive industries and transportation were to be Negro controlled” (Harrison, 1974, p. 2).
As he developed his views on African-American economics, it was evident that Du Bois rejected blending African-American economic activities into the larger mainstream American capitalist economy. Opposed to Washington’s integrationist path, Du Bois was a separatist. Moreover, Du Bois’s path was only marginally capitalist. Rather, he stressed that his approach rested on African-American “communalism” that was instilled in longstanding African and African-American culture. Du Bois’s communalism meant: “Service to family, clan, community, or nation becomes more than ‘the burden of being my brother’s keeper.’ Serving [the community] is motivated not be some abstract code of behavior; rather one serves others to serve oneself” (Harrison, 1974, p. 10). This is not capitalist individualism—or greed for that matter.
Badi Foster later writes that, “Contrary to the thrust of individualism, communalism holds that self-centeredness will not provide a just social order resulting from antagonistic cooperation”—i.e. supply vs. demand, labor vs. owner, etc. Bennett Harrison (citing Charles Hampden-Turner), further asserts: “It has been suggested that blacks tend to reject the ‘ideology of economic individualism’ in the belief that whites in positions of economic and political power explicitly use that ideology ‘to dominate poor people and keep them competitively divide.’” The icing on the communalism cake as political culture is Du Bois himself, who later stated that cooperation “represents a revival of African communalism, a ‘tradition of cooperation in the field of economic endeavor [which] is outstanding in Negro cultures everywhere’” (Harrison, 1974, p. 4, citing Hampden-Turner, 1969, p. 83).7
In the writings and advocacy of these two early intellectual leaders, three important contrasts emerged. First, Du Bois rejected Washington’s assimilation path, instead urging separate, Negro-controlled socialism, not capitalism. Second, Washington stressed individual self-achievement, mastering skills and creating wealth within the capitalist economy; entrepreneurism or black small business formation was his principal strategy. Du Bois, however, argued for blacks to “cooperate,” to work together to develop separately from the colonial white economy. Third, Du Bois stressed that mutual cooperation should bring benefit to the black community as a whole, not just to Washington’s individual entrepreneurs. In effect, Du Bois rejected individual assimilation in favor of a separate community-wide prosperity achieved by cooperative action of its members—separate from that of the outside “white economy.”
Lacking a “place,” Du Bois’s ideas sort of floated over African-American economic development thought—until the Great Migration produced cohesive black communities, lodged in high-poverty, marginalized residential neighborhoods in Big Cities. At that point, the ghetto provided a context, culture and a market for his ideas. I am open to the perspective that, subsequent to the Great Migration—as blacks settled into hostile economic, political and social competition with whites in the Big Cities of the industrial North and Midwest—many blacks living in depressed neighborhoods with unresponsive urban governments evolved culturally from values that had sustained Washington. Leaving the South for Northern climes, it might be argued, created a ghetto community that shared new values and an identity that reinforced both separateness and communalism.
That is not to say, however, that Washington’s individual economic integrationist path had been rejected. Just the opposite. Future African-Americans could choose between an individualist capitalistic and entrepreneurial economic development path and a separatist, communalist, place-based path.
Ron W. Coan 