Conclusion
What lessons do we learn from this history, the intertwined development of black capitalism and community economic development, the lack of success of both, and now the abandonment of the minority poor because of more pressing concerns over cutting the inflation rate by reducing government spending and promoting growth by giving incentives to big capital?
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Notes
Wilfred L. David, “Black America in Development Perspective, Part I,”Review of Black Political Economy, Winter 1973.
Cited by Phillip Foner,Blacks and Organized Labor, (New York: Praeger, 1972) p. 8.
Ibid., p. 11.
Gunnar Myrdal,An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (New York: Harper and Row, 1944), Volume II, p. 876n.
Horace R. Cayton and George S. Mitchell,Black Workers and the New Unions (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1939) p. 377.
Abram L. Harris,The Negro as Capitalist (Philadelphia: The American Academy of Political and Social Sciences, 1936), pp. 49–50; cited by E. Franklin Frazier,Black Bourgeois (New York: Macmillan, 1957) p. 129.
Proceedings of The National Negro Business League, August 23–24, 1900, p. 26; cited by Frazier, Ibid.
These quotations are drawn from a work in progress by Mark Nasson.
See Arthur I. Blaustein and Geoffrey Faux, “Campaign Politics and Black Capitalism,” inThe Star-Spangled Hustle: The Story of a Nixon Promise (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1973).
Bayard Rustin, “The Failure of Black Separatism,”Harper’s Magazine, January 1970.
See Bayard Rustin, “Nixon-Style Black Capitalism Can’t Provide Social Justice,”AFL-CIO News, January 5, 1974; “SBA’s Troubles” Review and Outlook,Wall street Journal December 13, 1973; Paul Delaney, “Bribe Inquiry Under Way on Minority BusinessAid,” New York Times, November 11, 1973; Mary Breasted, Pressure is cited in Matther Case, The White House is Accused of Trying to Foil Inquiry on Prominent Black Doctor,New York Times, November 29, 1973; “ ‘All Assistance Possible’ to Matthews Reported Ordered Personally by Nixon,”New York Times, December 11, 1973; Paul Delaney, “Minorities and Fear for Capitalism Program,”New York Times, December 1, 1973.
The first figure is from a survey by the Black Economic Research Center. The second is from Dunn and Bradstreet. The figures on black “big” business come from Earl G. Graves, publisher ofBlack Enterprise. Also see Joann S. Lublin “Black Firms’ Blues,”Wall Street Journal, April 1, 1975, p. 1; Lloyd Hogan, “The Impact of the Current Economic Crisis on Black Owned Businesses,”Review of Black Political Economy, Spring 1975; and Bureau of the Census,Minority Owned Business—Black MB 72-1. Perhaps one can do no better than to quote Robert Browne’s 1970 summary on the matter which has equal relevance a decade later: “Black entrepreneurship, as the term is presently used, is important to the black community principally for psychological reasons. From an economic point of view, most of the ‘black capitalism’ presently being pursued is not capable of aiding more than an infinitesimal number of black people and therefore may be absorbing resources far out of proportion to the economic benefits which it bestows.” Robert S. Browne, “Barriers to Black Participation in the American Economy,”Review of Black Political Economy Vol. 1, No. 2., Autumn 1970, p. 63.
Terence Smith, “Millions in U.S. Loans Squandered in Minority Program, Inquiry Finds,”New York Times, November 9, 1978, pp. 1 and 16.
Michael P. Brooks, “The Community Action Program as a Setting for Applied Research,”Journal of Social Economy, January 1965, p. 31.
Stewart E. Perry, “Federal Support for CDCs: Some of the History and Issues of Community Control,”Review of Black Political Economy.
In almost all the period, ownership and control by residents promoting substantial participation by area residents and institution buildings were stressed. “Minority development is a complex process with economic, social, psychological, and political ramifications. Its economic objectives are the easiest to state: higher income, better jobs and more jobs, and ownership and control of productive assets—money, jobs, status, and a piece of the action. Political objectives include control of community-level functions such as education, police, and local government in general, and power to advance minority interests on the national level. Social and personal goals relate to self-esteem, the respect of others, and meaningful lives without discriminatory restrictions.” Joel Bergsman and Melvin Jones, “Modeling Minority Economic Development,”Review of Black Political Economy, Fall 1973, Vol. 4 No. 1, p. 42. Thaddeus Spratlen in 1973 offered a comprehensive discussion of the range of meanings for the term Community Economic Development. They seem to range from applied urban economics to various descriptions of (or prescriptions for) the inner-city portion of urban areas. Business development, black capitalism, black liberation and self-determination, and other terms have been equated with community economic development. “Community” tends to refer primarily to urban black ghettos, clusters of low-income neighborhoods or poverty areas, and other sections of metropolitan regions which have severe problems of underinvestment, unemployment, and other forms of economic stagnation and decline. “Economic” content includes resources, markets, and relationships involved in meeting the material needs of community residents. Although emphasis tends to be focused on income-generation and capital accumulation, “development” is viewed as a coherent and comprehensive description of a discipline (or subfield of some larger discipline), community economic development can be defined in the following way: “The comprehensive, coordinated and planned use of private and government resources, organizations, and people in efforts designed to reverse the stagnation and decline of a community, and contribute to its growth, prosperity, and capacity to meet the economic needs of those associated with the community.” Thaddeus H. Spratlen, “Classroom and Community Needs in Community Economic Development: Some Basic Questions for Exploration and Evaluation,” a paper presented to the Union for Radical Political Economics Session. “What is Community Economic Development and How Do We Teach It?” December 28, 1973, New York City.
Also see Arthur I. Blaustein, “What is Community Economic Development?”Urban Affairs Quarterly, September 1970. William Haddad and G. Douglas Pugh, (ed.),Black Economic Development (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1969). The bill was S. 3876, 90th Congress, 2nd Session.
“Achieving these limited goals may require expropriating some local landlords and businessmen, it may undermine some petty white racketeers and party hacks, it may deny some government-salaried jobs to some white middle-class professionals, and it may weaken some racist union locals. But none of these groups are part of the national power structure anyway. The superestablishment recognizing that Blacks must be placated in some way, will be prepared to sacrifice the small fry local white exploiters so that it may continue uninterrupted with its global strategies.” Robert S. Browne, “Toward An Overall Assessment of Our Alternatives,”Review of Black Political Economy. Spring/Summer 1970, p. 23.
Blaustein and Faux, op. cit., p. 35.
Piven and Cloward write of poor people’s movements generally: ”In each case, elites responded to discontent by proposing reforms with which they had experience, and which consisted mainly of extending established procedures to new groups or to new institutional arenas.... At the same time that government makes efforts to reintegrate disaffected groups, and to guide them into less politically disturbing forms of behavior, it also moves to isolate them from potential supporters and, by doing so, diminishes the morale of the movement.” Francis Fox Piven and Richard Cloward,Poor People’s Movements (New York: Vintage, 1978), p. 33.
Nelson Blackstock,COINTELPPO (New York: Vintage Books, 1976), especially Chapters 3–5.
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Tabb, W.K. What happened to black economic development?. Rev Black Polit Econ 17, 65–88 (1988). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02901072
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02901072