Academia: Histories of Black Capitalism
Thursday's Child Has Less Than a Month Before the Fall Semester
I’ve been a very restless steward of my course offerings over thirty years of teaching. I generally have had at least one new course offering each year and I generally redesign existing courses pretty heavily. I tend to give up quickly on a class idea if it doesn’t seem to hit the sweet spot that I was aiming at, which in some cases is probably a mistake. I sort of think of classes as “pop-ups”, investigating whether a question and some readings and materials are as interesting to students as I think they are to me. Every once in a while, I find that the material isn’t as interesting to me as I expected; more often, I find that it just doesn’t resonate with students as much as I’d hoped, usually for reasons that become clear in the semester. However, every professor finds over the course of a career that a class that kind of bombed one time will absolutely electrify students on another occasion, so it’s important not to over-read the seeming mood on any given occasion. Sometimes courses work on a delayed timer: I’ve had students tell me years later that they weren’t very engaged by the course at the time they took it but that it’s had a huge impact on them over time—that they just weren’t ready at that moment to process what we were doing.
In the coming academic year, I’ve got two new courses, one in the fall and the other in the spring. I’m excited by both, but especially this fall’s class on the history of Black capitalism. This syllabus began, as my new course ideas often do, with reading a particular text and pondering whether I could find a way to work it into a class, in this case, Thomas Healy’s Soul City, about Floyd McKissick’s attempt to use the Nixon Administration’s “black capitalism” initiative to build a city in North Carolina that aimed at empowering Black Americans through business.
As I thought about Healy’s book, a lot of other exciting readings came to mind, many of them biographical or case studies of particular companies or businesses. I also thought immediately of the centrality of capitalism as an idea to Marcus Garvey’s political philosophy, an element that some later readers tended to skip around. In pretty short order, that led to the syllabus I’m posting here today. This has also been a great course design experience in terms of leading me to works I didn’t know before, like Marcia Chatelain’s Franchise and Quincy Mills’ Cutting Along the Color Line.
As usual also there are things I’m not happy about. I wanted to get something on business within the worldview of the Black Panthers and the Nation of Islam into the mix, but I couldn’t find room for it. They do come in to some of what we’re reading, though. Getting both African and U.S. examples in there is going to be a somewhat difficult balancing act—and it leaves out a lot of work I could potentially assign on Black entrepreneurs in the rest of the Americas and in Europe. (I considered using Janet McGaffrey’s Paris/Congo, for example.) There’s a few weeks where the reading load is ambitious (a whole book) but I’ll see what seems realistic when we get into it—and I think most of the full books read pretty well. I made a decision to go pretty hard on the case study/empirical approach, but I’m inviting the students to do some theorizing in their writing—and I know that some of the students who have signed up are going to do a great job rising to that invitation.
Image credit: "Soul City" by United States Department of Housing and Urban Development, American, founded 1965 is marked with CC0 1.0.
History 86 Equiano to Oprah: Histories of Black Capitalism
Fall 2023
W 1:15-4
Professor Timothy Burke
This course is an examination of the history of Black capitalism from the late 18th Century to the present day. At the heart of the course, we are studying the history of Black individuals and groups that have seen capitalism as useful or central to Black freedom (theirs or that of others), as a counter to antiblackness, or as a welcome component of Black modernity and belonging. We will be primarily studying this history through case studies, mostly biographical, rather than through theory or political philosophy, working up to general or theoretical interpretations from the details of lived experience. All personal and ideological perspectives on capitalism and Black history are welcome in this course; I only ask that you keep an open mind as you engage the lived details of this history and join in our work together.
The reading load varies from week to week. In each week, there will be one main reading or film that everyone is responsible for engaging. In some weeks, we will have three additional articles assigned where each member of the class must take on the responsibility to read one of these additional articles and report back to the rest of the class about its contents. In other weeks, we will be reading a substantial portion of a book. We will also watch the documentary Boss: The Black Experience in Business over the fall break.
There are three primary assignments during the semester. The first is a 3-4 page paper due Friday October 6th that is a critical assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of biographical case studies for studying the history of Black capitalism. The second is due at the beginning of class on November 15th: each student will be making a 10-minute slidedeck presentation of a case study of a contemporary Black entrepreneur or CEO or on a Black-owned corporation, accompanied by a short 1-2 page written summary of your analysis of the case study. Finally, there is a 7-9 page paper due by December 20th that is a personal engagement with the central questions of the course: has Black capitalism been empowering or emancipatory? Can it be? What is the relationship between Black capitalism and Black aspiration or striving generally? When Black capitalism has been the site of struggle, is that because of white supremacy or because of something intrinsic to capitalism itself? What is the place of Black capitalism in capitalism?
I am always willing to give extensions for writing assignments, but please be sure to plan ahead and ask. Because this is a discussion-based course that meets once a week, attendance is important. There is no way to make up for or easily summarize a missed discussion, where we are all doing work together and contributing to each other’s learning.
Sept 6
James Fulcher, Capitalism: A Very Short Introduction, Chap. 1
What is capitalism?
What is (is there?) racial capitalism
Black freedom and antiblackness
Black capitalists: biography and case study
Theorizing from cases
What is the place of Black capitalists in capitalism?
Small business/local business/the multiplicity of capitalisms
‘Gatekeeper sovereignty’/rentiers/compradorial capitalists
The liberalism in capitalism; capitalism as a vulnerability of white supremacy?
Comparative advantage: Black consumers, Black capitalists, Black production
Sept 13
Hinds, Elizabeth Jane Wall. “The Spirit of Trade: Olaudah Equiano’s Conversion, Legalism, and the Merchant’s Life.” African American review 32, no. 4 (1998): 635–647.
*Winch, Julie. A Gentleman of Color : the Life of James Forten. Oxford ;: Oxford University Press, 2002, Chapter Four
*Sparks, Randy J. Where the Negroes Are Masters : An African Port in the Era of the Slave Trade. 1st ed. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014, Chapter Two.
*Olukoju, A. (2014). Accumulation and Conspicuous Consumption: The Poverty of Entrepreneurship in Western Nigeria, ca. 1850–1930. In E. Akyeampong, R. Bates, N. Nunn, & J. Robinson (Eds.), Africa's Development in Historical Perspective (pp. 208-230). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Sept 20
Prince of Darkness
Shane White, Prince of Darkness, as much as possible
Sept 27
Striving and Strivers
Self-Made (Netflix), Episode 3
*Bell, Karen Cook. “The State of Freedom Is the State of Self-Reliance.” In Claiming Freedom: Race, Kinship, and Land in Nineteenth-Century Georgia, 69–87. University of South Carolina Press, 2018. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv6wghxq.9.
*Warner, Lee H. “California.” In Free Men in an Age of Servitude: Three Generations of a Black Family, 71–84. University Press of Kentucky, 1992. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt130j254.10.
*Walker, Juliet E.K. “The Achievement of a Dream.” In Free Frank: A Black Pioneer on the Antebellum Frontier, 1st ed., 147–63. University Press of Kentucky, 1983. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt130jc3f.14.
Oct 4
Rosewood
*Weems, Robert E. “Business Titan: The Douglass National Bank and the Victory Life Insurance Company.” In The Merchant Prince of Black Chicago: Anthony Overton and the Building of a Financial Empire, 79–117. University of Illinois Press, 2020. https://doi.org/10.5406/j.ctvxkn5wn.8.
*Lomax, Michael E. “Black Baseball and the Separate Black Economy.” In Black Baseball Entrepreneurs, 1902-1931: The Negro National and Eastern Colored Leagues, 138–70. Syracuse University Press, 2014. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1j1nvws.9.
*Snider, Jill D.. “A Dream Begins Anew.” In Lucean Arthur Headen: The Making of a Black Inventor and Entrepreneur, 110–28. University of North Carolina Press, 2020. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5149/9781469654379_snider.13.
3-4 page short response paper due by Friday Oct 6, 5pm: strengths and weaknesses of case studies/biography for understanding Black capitalism
Oct 11
20th C. Africa
Austin, Gareth. “The Emergence of Capitalist Relations in South Asante Cocoa-Farming, C. 1916–33.” Journal of African History 28, no. 2 (1987): 259–279.
*Maliehe, Sean M. “Basotho in Colonial Commerce, 1900s–1966.” In Commerce as Politics: The Two Centuries of Struggle for Basotho Economic Independence, 1st ed., 8:66–79. Berghahn Books, 2021. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv2tsxjbj.10.
*Shutt, Allison K. “Pioneer Farmers and Family Dynasties in Marirangwe Purchase Area, Colonial Zimbabwe, 1931–1947.” African Studies Review 43, no. 3 (2000): 59–80.
*Mutongi, Kenda. “Thugs or Entrepreneurs? Perceptions of Matatu Operators in Nairobi, 1970 to the Present.” Africa (London. 1928) 76, no. 4 (2006): 549–568.
FALL BREAK
Watch Boss: The Black Experience in Business
Oct 25
Cutting Along the Color Line, pp. 108-254
Grant, Otis B. “Social Justice versus Social Equality: The Capitalistic Jurisprudence of Marcus Garvey.” Journal of Black Studies 33, no. 4 (2003): 490–98. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3180876.
Nov 1
Chatelain, Marcia, Franchise, as much as possible
The Jeffersons, Episode 1 (In-class)
Nov 8
Healy, Thomas, Soul City, as much as possible
The Banker (in-class, first half)
Nov 15
Black Capitalism in the present moment: US/Diaspora/Africa
Case study presentations/discussion
“Black in Business”, https://www.forbes.com/sites/ruthumoh/2020/02/03/celebrating-black-history-month-2020
Alleyne, “Oprah Means Business”, Black Enterprise
NO CLASS
Nov 29
Jim Ovia, Africa Rise and Shine
Lionheart (2018)
Harvard Business School interview with Peter Vundla
Dec 6
Discussion of final essays
Reprise of first class discussion
Final paper due by 5pm on December 20th.