Building the Black Metropolis

The economic advancement of African Americans over the past century has been limited in part because of how racial inequality is tied to—and reproduced by—segregation, north and south. Indeed, black political thought and action has long grappled with the spatial conditions of liberation. Robert E. Weems Jr. and Jason P. Chambers's edited volume Building the Black Metropolis explores these themes by examining the history of black business in twentieth-century Chicago. A fine introduction provides a chronological and interpretative overview of efforts by Chicago's black entrepreneurs to turn “the disadvantages of their segregation into opportunities” (p. 3). A growing black consumer market emerged by the 1920s, catalyzed by the Great Migration and the hardening of racial segregation. This gave rise to the hope that blacks might achieve “substantive self-determination in their economic and political lives” through racial solidarity in hiring, shopping, advertising, and banking (p. 8). The Great Depression undermined this aspiration, increasing black poverty and taking down some of the city's largest black businesses. This included banks owned by Jesse Binga, P. W. Chavers, and Anthony Overton, ably described in chapters by Robert Howard and Weems. Several chapters note the limits placed on black business by the lack of capital caused by racial discrimination. Will Cooley, in a fascinating discussion of “Jim Crow organized crime,” finds that the black criminal underworld—especially in the policy rackets—briefly stepped in where white capital would not (p. 147). By the 1950s, however, white gangsters had “colonized organized crime” in black areas, skimming huge profits while refusing to put blacks in leadership roles—mimicking what white “legitimate” businesses were doing at the same time (p. 154

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