Entrepreneurs

By: Juliet E. Walker

Source:

 Black Women in America, Second Edition

Entrepreneurs

African American women have a long tradition of participation in business, including entrepreneurial activities. In colonial America, their initial economic activities, primarily gender-based household manufacturing, farming, trade, and marketing ventures, were derived from activities that had been important to women in precolonial Africa. By capitalizing on culturally familiar agriculture techniques, African women were able to enter the colonial American economy as truck farmers and market women. By the nineteenth century, food trading by African women was so substantial that, as one diarist noted in Louisiana, “The market places are filled with Negro women selling fruits and vegetables.…They have control of the markets in New Orleans [and] bring their products to the market very neatly.”

Urban areas, such as New Orleans, offered the most opportunities for black women, both enslaved and free, to establish business ventures. Throughout the period of slavery, food marketing and preparation constituted the largest occupational category among black women in business for themselves.

Expertise in cooking and baking enabled black women to establish their own businesses. These women frequently began as food vendors or hucksters and then opened a stall in the local marketplace. Some were able to use their profits to establish a shop, by either renting or purchasing property. During the Revolutionary War era, “Duchess” Quamino established a bakery in Newport, Rhode Island, that remained in business until the early nineteenth century.

Black women also established small shops in towns and cities as retail merchants, primarily in the sale of notions, while others sold secondhand goods. These activities were rarely profitable. One notable exception was the New Orleans–based merchant Madame Eulalie “CeCee” d'Mandeville Macarty, who specialized in the sale of “fancy goods,” most of them imported from France.

Tastes of Success

By the 1840s, thanks to her diverse financial activities as an informal banker specializing in interest-paying loans and discounted banknotes, Madame Macarty was worth more than $155,000. Other black women, while few in number, also participated in the antebellum financial industry, not only as informal bankers but also as purchasers of bank stock, municipal bonds, and investments in internal improvements.

Property ownership by black women, while relatively uncommon, began in the seventeenth century, and most black women real estate holders used their property as the location of their enterprises, including those who established or inherited plantations. Plantations worked by slaves represented the largest antebellum business enterprises owned by black women. The largest number of black female planters lived in Louisiana. While most inherited these plantations, some from whites, the most successful of these women planters was Marie Thereze, née Coincoin (1742–1816?). Unlike many black women planters, Coincoin, the daughter of African-born parents, remained a slave until she was forty-six years old. Once freed, Coincoin used her tremendous entrepreneurial acumen to establish a twelve-thousand-acre cotton plantation worked by more than two hundred enslaved women, men, and children.

In urban areas, access to property, by renting, purchase, or inheritance, allowed black women to establish boardinghouses, inns, and cleaning establishments in addition to various kinds of shops in the clothing industry. Black women were not only seamstresses but also milliners, dressmakers, and fashion designers. Most notable among these last was Elizabeth Keckley, who secured her manumission as a result of her sewing. Besides being noted as the dressmaker and confidante of Mary Todd Lincoln, the wife of President Abraham Lincoln, Keckley employed some twenty seamstresses in her high couture dress design establishment.

In the South, black businesswomen in the garment-making industry constituted the largest group of black women slaveholders, including some who had themselves been slaves. In Charleston, within six years of purchasing her freedom, the dressmaker Philada Turner earned enough money to purchase not only her daughter for $500 but also a woman to work as her assistant. Indeed, many black women in the South who became business owners started their enterprise while enslaved. Most were slaves who hired their own time. After paying their owners for allowing them to do so, these women could use the remaining profits to purchase necessities, desired items, or even their own freedom.

Antebellum black women were also involved in the selling of health and beauty aids. In the healthcare profession, some black women worked independently as nurses and midwives. Others established nursing homes and bathhouses. In the 1820s, Amelia Gallé of Petersburg, Virginia, inherited a bathhouse from her former owner, an establishment she managed for years before becoming the owner and proprietor. Black women also were “herbal” or “botanical” doctors. Some offered psychic healing as conjurers, faith healers, and voodoo practitioners, such as the notorious New Orleans “Voodoo Queen,” Madame Marie Laveau (1790–1881).

Elizabeth Potter detailed her life as an antebellum hairdresser in A Hairdresser's Experience in High Life (1858). The three Remond sisters, daughters of a prominent abolitionist family established the Ladies Hair Work Salon in Salem, Massachusetts, where they opened a factory to manufacture wigs and a tonic for hair loss. Much of their market, primarily white, was through their mail order service that covered several New England states.

Work, Legitimate and Other

Not all black women succeeded in supporting themselves through “legitimate” enterprises, however. As a last resort, some worked in the sex industry as prostitutes, either as streetwalkers or in brothels, some of which were owned by free black women. In the South, the most profitable enterprise in the sex industry was the Louisiana placage system of negotiated consensual sex that developed between free women of color, called the placée, and wealthy white men. In exchange for her sexual services, the placée was advanced a substantial sum to purchase a house and to provide for any children that might result from the relationship. After this relationship ended, the former placée often transformed her home into a boardinghouse.

By the onset of the Civil War, black women, slave and free, both in the North and South, had owned and operated a variety of profitable businesses. Indeed, despite the constraints of racism, sexism, and women's subordinate legal status, there were few areas of antebellum enterprises developed by black men in which black woman did not also participate. Black women engaged not only in both the informal as well as the internal slave economy of the antebellum South but also in the formal economy of the nation's mainstream business communities. Invariably, the most successful enterprises had a white clientele. Still, gender-based occupations provided the venue for most enterprises established by antebellum black women.

In 1860, 11 percent, some 494,000, of the total African American population (4,488,000), was free. At that time, 15 percent of free black women were dressmakers and hairdressers, including those who owned their own business, while 5 percent operated boardinghouses or small shops. The remaining 80 percent were laborers, laundresses, and domestics, including day workers and those in service. Occupations of free black women were listed in various censuses, but only one occupation was given per individual. That practice obscures their various self-employment activities, especially since many antebellum black women held several jobs. Also, some municipal censuses provided information on the occupations of slave women, invariably those who hired their own time and who lived apart from their owners.

In the Rhode Island census, Elleanor Eldridge (1785–1865), listed as a domestic or “keeping house,” had several enterprises, including selling real estate. Profits from her businesses, soap manufacturing, “Matrass [sic] Maker,” and a partnership with her sister in a “white-washing, papering, and painting” enterprise, funded her real estate ventures.

Married women of both races, but especially the wives of commercial farmers, were listed in censuses as “keeping house,” despite their many other occupations. On the Kentucky and Illinois frontiers, Lucy McWorter (1771–1870), whose freedom was purchased in 1817 by her enslaved entrepreneur husband, Free Frank, earned money by making cloth and candles and soap, processing cheese and butter and other foodstuffs, canning vegetables and fruit, harvesting honey and beeswax, cultivating medicinal herbs, and raising poultry. Profits from sales of these products, added to those earned by Lucy's husband, including his activities as the first black town founder (New Philadelphia, Illinois, in 1836), were used to purchase thirteen family members from slavery.

In the 1850s, the former slave Clara Brown in Central City, Colorado, used profits from her cookshop and laundry business to invest in Colorado gold mines by staking prospectors for one-half interest in their claims. Biddy Mason, a former slave living in Los Angeles, used profits from her work as a nurse and midwife to purchase real estate, subsequently valued at $250,000. Both women used their profits to buy family members and friends from slavery. The former slave Mary Ellen Pleasant, a San Francisco boardinghouse owner and allegedly a madam, also established one of the city's most elegant restaurants, an informal employment agency, and a chain of laundries. She was recognized as a financial investor, adviser, and informal banker, who accumulated great wealth.

Working Together

Antebellum black women's economic activities also included the founding of cooperative business enterprises. In 1841, an organization in New York called 100 Black Women opened a cooperative grocery store, the Female Trading Association. Black women were also active in the Free Produce Movement, which encouraged consumer boycotts of slave-produced goods. Also, during and after the Civil War, the activists Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman established independent self-help economic enterprises.

Nonetheless, while black women were involved in many areas of the nation's economy, overall, from slavery to freedom, the vast majority of black women continued to work as laborers, either in agriculture or in urban menial domestic occupations, housecleaning, child care, washing and ironing, cooking, sewing, and nursing. Saddled with low wages, these women worried not only about how to provide for themselves and their families during illness and unemployment but also how to provide for their funeral expenses.

During slavery, mutual aid societies were important in helping to meet these needs. Significantly, these societies represented an extension of the African cultural pattern of consanguineous cooperative enterprise and the pooling and sharing of resources. The first black women's mutual aid societies that provided insurance benefits for sickness, unemployment, and funeral expenses were founded in the late eighteenth century. They increased in number and membership throughout slavery and after the Civil War, providing the foundation for the subsequent professionalization of black women's business activities in the nation's financial industry. The Independent Order of St Luke (IOSL), founded by the former slave Mary Prout in 1867, began to professionalize as a financial institution under Maggie Lena Walker. In 1901, Walker set up an insurance department. Then, in 1903, to provide a depository for IOSL funds, Walker established the first bank founded by an American woman, the Saint Luke Penny Thrift Savings Bank. Other early-twentieth-century black women who participated in founding financial institutions included Mary McLeod Bethune, a cofounder of the Central Life Insurance Company of Tampa, Florida, and Minnie Cox (1869–1933). With her husband, Cox was cofounder of both the Delta Penny Savings Bank and the Mississippi Life Insurance Company.

The founding of black-owned financial institutions was a response to a Jim Crow America that created two worlds of race, including a separate black economy. Excluded from white financial institutions, African Americans at the turn of the century began to establish their own banks and insurance companies. As black business districts developed, many new shops were established by black women, including, dress and millinery establishments, florist and beauty shops, business service stores, bakeries, cafés, and restaurants. As was the case before the Civil War, some women started in the food industry as street vendors. In New York, Lillian Harris, known as “Pig Foot Mary,” was so successful as a street vendor that by World War I, with profits invested in real estate, she was one of the wealthiest black women in Harlem.

With urbanization and northern migration, there was an increased emphasis, especially by black women's organizations, such as the National Association of Black Club Women (NACW), as well as by black educational institutions, to encourage African American women to improve their grooming and to make themselves presentable for city life. Hair care was emphasized, so there was a new market demand for beauty products. Ignored as this market was by whites, blacks were able to capitalize on this economic niche. The first successful manufacturer of black hair care products was Annie Minerva Turnbo-Malone (1869–1957), who developed and manufactured hair products under the Poro brand name. She established her enterprise in 1900 in the all-black town of Brooklyn, Illinois. In 1902, Turnbo-Malone moved to Saint Louis, Missouri, where she expanded production and sales. One of her saleswomen, Madam C. J. Walker (1867–1919), launched her own hair products manufacturing enterprise in Colorado in 1906.

With the management, manufacturing, and marketing of black hair products, facial creams, and cosmetics, these two black women entrepreneurs generated over the years sales in the millions of dollars. In the growth of their enterprises, market distribution was both national and international. At the same time, they expanded employment opportunities for black women as sales agents and by opening beauty schools that trained thousands of black women, who subsequently opened beauty shops.

Still, aside from hair products, black women established few manufacturing enterprises during the first three decades of the twentieth century. In 1918, Evelyn Berry and Victoria Ross founded the Berry and Ross Doll Manufacturing Company in Harlem. After World War I, the company expanded by moving into the manufacturing of women's and children's clothing. In 1920 the newly named Berry and Ross Manufacturing Company purchased a three-story building in Norfolk, Virginia, with plans to establish a chain of department stores, but before the end of the decade, Berry and Ross had closed their business.

Until the 1930s, a steady growth of black businesses was concentrated primarily in four areas: barbers and hairdressers, restaurateurs, retail merchants, and undertakers. During the Great Depression, there was a decline in the number of barber and beauty shops and retail merchants, compared with slight increases in the two categories that could be assured a steady clientele: restaurants and funeral homes. Significantly, the expansion of large black businesses from 1900 to 1930 represented the first of four phases in the rise of black corporate America in the twentieth century. The second phase of black corporate America extended from the 1930s to the civil rights era. During these first two phases, the distinguishing feature of black women's businesses was the establishment of enterprises that provided goods and services primarily to a black consumer market. With few exceptions, these enterprises were individually owned proprietorships. During this second phase, black women enjoyed few business successes, except in the food industry. In 1937 Minnie Lee Fellings established the Minnie Lee Pie Company in Chicago. In Birmingham, Alabama, Gertrude Alexander established the Nanette Candy Company. In 1941, when her company grossed $60,000, Alexander was considered one of the nation's leading black businesswomen.

The most successful black businesswoman during this second phase of black corporate America was Sarah Spencer Washington, who founded the New Jersey–based Apex News and Hair Company in 1919. Her business survived the Depression, and from the 1930s until her death in 1953, Apex was one of the nation's largest black businesses. During the 1930s, sales of the Poro and Walker hair care products were eclipsed by Apex hair products. A shrewd businesswoman, Washington was described as the “Genius with the Midas Touch.” She owned extensive business property, including her Apex warehouse, Apex Auditorium, Apex Laboratory, and Apex Publishing Company. While Apex remained the market leader in the black hair care products industry, after World War II black women began to make gains in the cosmetic industry. The Chicago-based Marguerita Ward Cosmetics Company Inc., founded in 1922, survived the Depression only to suffer a decline during World War II and then resumed manufacturing after 1945, when a new generation of black women moved into the cosmetics industry. In Harlem, Rose Meta Inc., founded in 1946, introduced a full line of cosmetics for black women. It was also the first black-owned company to sell such products in a major white department store.

Annie Mae Manigault, photographed in the 1920s. She graduated from the Renouard School of Embalming in New York City, and then began her fifty-year career by working with her parents in the Manigault Funeral Home in Columbia, South Carolina.

Richard S. Roberts Collection

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The increased incomes of blacks, a result of World War II employment, resulted in more disposable income, as well as a demand for consumer goods that had been limited during the war. With the demilitarization of American industry, for example, black car ownership increased. With African Americans traveling more than ever before, but confronted with continued segregation in public accommodations, there was an expanded demand for black businesses in the food, lodging, and tourist industries. Between 1942 and 1954, Sally Walker developed a three-hundred-acre, $400,000 Catskill Mountain resort with dance casinos and a lake for swimming, fishing, and rowing, as well as tennis and basketball courts. The Apex titan Sarah Spencer Washington, denied privileges to play on golf courses in Atlantic City, New Jersey, established a nine-hole golf course and country club in addition to a $50,000 Apex Rest Tourist Retreat and a $100,000 Brigantine Hotel to accommodate blacks.

In the years following World War II, black women began to capitalize on emerging markets in the entertainment industry. In 1946, Gladys Hampton, the wife of Lionel Hampton, became the first black woman to own a record company, and in 1953, Vivian Carter was a founding partner in the Chicago-based Vee-Jay Record Company. The participation of black women in new lines of business would continue to increase throughout the last half of the twentieth century.

Civil Rights Era and Beyond

The civil rights era marked the beginning of the third wave of the rise of black corporate America, which differed in three important ways from black business activities before the 1960s. From the post–civil rights era until the 1980s, black business activities were distinguished by an increase in the number of multimillion dollar enterprises, an increase in the number of businesses in the mainstream American business community beyond the traditional retail and service enterprises, and the development of businesses with crossover markets. In addition, black women in black corporate America would advance into upper-management positions. Motown Records, with its crossover market, exemplified the expansion of black business in the third-wave rise of black corporate America as well as the positioning of black women in executive management positions. Suzanne de Passe, a Motown president, subsequently established her own television and movie production company.

Also, the post–civil rights era marked an expansion of black women's participation in the financial industry. In the investment sector, Chicago-based Barbara Landers Bowles in 1990 established Kenwood Group Inc., a registered investment advisory firm. Ernesta Bowman Procope, whose E. G. Bowman Co. Inc., founded in 1954, was the first minority-owned insurance brokerage firm on Wall Street, expanded her participation in finance by forming an investment firm in 1991, Bond, Procope Capital Management. In the banking industry, Emma Chappell in 1992 founded the United Bank of Philadelphia, a full-service commercial bank, while the entertainer Janet Jackson became involved in the banking industry as a majority shareholder owner. In 1998, along with the former Motown president Jheryl Busby and “Magic” Johnson, the consortium acquired 60 percent majority common stock interest in the Founders National Bank of Los Angeles. In 2002, it merged with three other black banks, which in turn became the Boston-based OneUnited Bank, the largest black-owned bank in the new century and, with branches in Massachusetts, Florida, and California, the first black interstate bank in the country.

Paradoxically, the early twentieth century was distinguished by the participation of black women in banking, pioneered by Maggie Lena Walker, but by the 1950s, black women had lost their prominence in the black hair care products manufacturing industry not only to black men but also to corporate white America.

Black women, however, expanded their participation in the black cosmetics industry. The most successful endeavor, Fashion Fair, launched in 1973, became the largest manufacturer of black women's cosmetics in just over a decade. Its driving force was Eunice Johnson, the wife of the Ebony publisher John H. Johnson. Later yet, Linda Johnson Rice, the Johnsons' daughter, would go on to become CEO of Fashion Fair's parent company, the Johnson Publishing Company.

In 1985 the fashion model Naomi Sims, founder of a successful wig manufacturer, launched a cosmetics company with sales limited to upscale department stores. Yet, less than 20 percent of black women purchased cosmetics from these stores. In response, Carol Jackson Mouyiaris developed her Black Opal line of skin care and cosmetic products for both women and men, which were sold in drugstores and discount retail giants. In the mid-1990s, Iman, the internationally famous Somalian model, introduced a line of cosmetics and skin care products for both women and men of color.

The most distinctive new area of enterprise developed by black women in the post–civil rights era was in the telecommunications industry. In 1979, Dorothy E. Brunson became the first black female owner of a radio station and, in 1990, the first black woman owner of a television station, when she purchased Philadelphia's WGTV, Channel 48. Cathy Hughes of Radio One purchased her first radio station, WOL-AM, in Washington, DC, in 1980. By 1995, with the $34 million purchase of another communications company, Hughes emerged as the industry's leader. In 2001, she became the first black woman to take her company, Radio One, public, with an initial public offer of $2 billion in shares. Indeed, two of the leading black entrepreneurs at the dawn of new the century were women in the entertainment industry. By 2002, Oprah Winfrey, with her entertainment media conglomerate, had emerged as the nation's second black billionaire.

The nation's leading talk show host, Oprah Winfrey proved herself formidable as a businesswoman and entrepreneur. First, in 1986, she bought out ownership in her Oprah Winfrey Show for $10 million. Then she established Harpo (Oprah spelled backward) Productions, which not only produced her show but also provided the venue for her production of television movies. In building her entertainment conglomerate, Winfrey diversified, with enterprises in the film, cable television, and publishing industries, while building strategic alliances with white corporate America. Winfrey expanded her conglomerate by moving into cable TV ownership, Oxygen Media Inc. In addition to Winfrey's Oxygen Media holdings, the Harpo Entertainment Group reached a licensing agreement with Hearst Corporation to create a new magazine, O: The Oprah Magazine, launched in April 2001. After its initial publication, O quickly become one of America's most successful periodicals. By 2004 Oprah Winfrey was the United States' only black billionaire.

In several respects, Oprah's enterprise was representative of the fourth-wave rise of black corporate America with its two most distinguishing features: an expansion in new forms of black business ownership, joint ventures, mergers, acquisitions, strategic partnerships, consolidations, and franchise ownerships; and, increasingly, a focus among black businesses on the high-tech revolution in various telecommunications industries.

More and more often at the turn of the twenty-first century, black women superstars in the entertainment and sports industries, capitalizing on their celebrity, expanded their participation on the business side of these industries. The hip-hop culture was an important force in contributing to the development of new enterprises by black women. The rap singer Queen Latifah, who also emerged as a TV and movie star, established Flavor Unit Records. Endorsement contracts also broadened the scope of business ventures by these black women superstars. The pop singer Beyoncé signed endorsement contracts with Pepsi and Tommy Hilfiger Toiletries, a division of Estée Lauder Companies. In the world of tennis, the Williams sisters secured phenomenal endorsement contracts: in 2000, Venus Williams signed a five-year, $40 million endorsement contract with Reebok; in 2004, she signed a global, multiyear, seven-figure endorsement contract with American Express. In the meantime, Serena Williams signed a $55 to $60 million endorsement contract with Nike. In 2003 the boxer Laila Ali, Muhammad Ali's daughter, signed a multiyear agreement with Adidas to endorse its boxing training gear and boots. She also became a spokeswoman for the formerly black-owned Soft Sheen-Carson's, later a subsidiary of the French-based L'Oreal company, while the hip-hop artist Missy Elliot, along with Madonna, was featured in Gap Clothing commercials.

Eliza Ann Miller, a forerunner of Oprah Winfrey in entertainment entrepreneurship, was the first woman to build and operate a movie theater in Arkansas. This photograph is from the book How I Succeeded in My Business (1911), by her husband, Rev. A. H. Miller.

Arkansas History Commission

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Significantly, with their endorsement contracts from white corporate America and their international celebrity, these black women superstars became an important force in the expansion of global capitalism. Indeed, the market for hip-hop products, which reflected the commodification of African American culture, was even larger overseas than in the United States. International markets were also important in generating advertising revenues for Oprah Winfrey. By 2004 the Winfrey show was syndicated globally to 109 countries.

Despite these steps forward, most businesses established by black women from slavery to freedom were relatively small enterprises. Indeed, while American women owned a substantial segment of the nation's businesses, over half of these businesses were small enterprises in the service sectors of the economy. The 1997 Survey of Women-Owned Business Enterprises (SWOBE) reported that women owned 5,417,034 of the United States' nonfarm businesses. The ownership of firms by women follows: white non-Hispanic women, 4,487,589; Hispanic women, 337,708; black women, 312,884; and Asian and Pacific Islander women, 247,966.

In 1997 firms owned by minority women recorded total sales and receipts of $84.7 billion. Asian and Pacific Islander women owners earned $38.1 billion, and the firms of Hispanic women claimed $27.3 billion, while those owned by black women earned only $13.6 billion compared to the $6.8 billion earned by American Indian and Alaska native women. American Indians and Alaskan native women constituted only 2 percent of the population, while blacks made up 12.3 percent. Moreover, while a larger percentage of black women as a group go into business than do other women, some 71 percent of all black businesses have receipts of less than $25,000. Overall, in 1997, the 823,500 African American businesses generated only $71.2 billion in revenues. More specifically, black business receipts amounted to only .4 percent of total American business revenues.

In the post–civil rights era, the federal government, through various affirmative action programs, was important in expanding opportunities for blacks to participate in mainstream American business. Particularly, federal government contracts and federal government programs that encouraged Fortune 500 companies to subcontract with minorities proved invaluable, especially in advancing the participation of black women in various fields of science and technology.

In 1993 Margie Lewis established Parallax, a Maryland-based nuclear engineering firm with contracts from the federal government and leading Fortune 500 companies. Virginia-based ITS Services Inc., an information technology and telecommunications support service, was founded in 1991 by Angela M. Mason. By 2002, with 460 employees and business receipts of $67 million, it ranked fifty-third on the “B.E. [Black Enterprise] Industrial/Service 100.”

Ironically, federal government contracts provided the basis for black women to professionalize cleaning services beyond domestic housekeeping employment. In the service industry, Sherra Aguirre's Houston-based company, Aztec Facility Services, established in 1982, initially provided maid and janitorial services. By 2001, as a result of contracts from both Fortune 500 companies and the federal government, the company, with clients in four states, had grown to over one thousand employees, who provided large-scale facility management and environmental cleanup services. In 2002, the company had sales of $26 million.

All this should raise the question, “How significant has been the expansion of black women-owned businesses?” Most enterprises established by black women have remained small and generate only limited business receipts. By the dawn of the twenty-first century, African American women as entrepreneurs had sustained a virtual four-century tradition of business activities. Yet, paradoxically, just as at the beginning of the twentieth century, when two of the leading black American entrepreneurs were women—Madam C. J. Walker and Maggie Lena Walker—at the beginning of the twenty-first century, two of the nation's leading black entrepreneurs were women, Oprah Winfrey and Cathy Hughes. There will, of course, be continued participation of black women in business as entrepreneurs. But will increases in the numbers of black women–owned enterprises as well as increases in their business receipts match those of other American women? As black economic empowerment remains a major issue in the new civil rights movement, so, too, must be the promotion and expansion of black women–owned business enterprises.

See also Walker, Madam C. J.; Washington, Sarah Spencer; and Winfrey, Oprah.

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