Certain People (14 page)

Also lost, to many upper-crust blacks today, are the Negro spirituals. One woman says, “My grandfather was an itinerant preacher, who preached mostly in Baptist churches in the South. He did very well financially, and managed to buy a thousand acres of farmland in southeast Texas. I remember, when I was a little girl, that everywhere I looked and as far as I could see, it was Grandpa's land.” (She has recently sold her share of the Texas land, wisely retaining the mineral rights beneath.) She adds, “They say that Grandpa was a wonderful preacher, and had a beautiful singing voice. I never heard him preach, and I used to wonder what he sang. I was raised an Episcopalian, and we never heard a Negro spiritual in our church. I never heard a Negro spiritual in our house. I never even heard
of
a Negro spiritual until I was practically a grown woman. The other day, I heard Roberta Flack and Donny Hathaway singing ‘Come, Ye Disconsolate,' and I thought, ‘What a beautiful song!' Someone told me it was a Negro spiritual, and I was
amazed
. I had absolutely no idea that black people ever sang songs like that!”

10

Business Ups and Downs

Though it is common for blacks to attribute their woes to slavery, it is important to remember that not all blacks were slaves, and that there were free blacks in America from pre-Revolutionary days.

And, though it is common for blacks to lay the blame for their lack of great economic success at the feet of Jews and other “foreigners,” it is interesting to note that there were free black entrepreneurs who were prospering in the New World before any Jews had set foot on these shores. In 1634, the year when the first tiny band of twenty-three Sephardic Jews arrived in what is now New York, a black landowner in New Amsterdam already had a large parcel of real estate. In 1644, a group of eleven blacks was given acreage comprising what is now New York's Greenwich Village, and this area remained a black settlement for the next two hundred years. Outside Boston, in Dorchester, Massachusetts, a black man known simply as “Boston Ken” owned a house and lot and several acres of wheat fields that same year. Several years later, a man named Abijah Prince owned a hundred acres of farmland in Guilford, Vermont, and received equal shares of land in all six divisions of the township. These pioneer landowners made their money raising and selling staple crops—corn, wheat, rice, and tobacco. These black farmers bought and sold in the same markets as their white competitors, owned black and white indentured servants and, in at least one recorded instance, a black slave.

But, throughout the colonial period, days of relatively easy times
for blacks were inevitably followed by periods of harsh reaction and repression. As more and more blacks were freed, or were able to purchase the freedom of others, and migrated into heavily settled areas, they began to be seen as an economic threat to the white majority. Beginning in the middle of the seventeenth century, nearly every colony started passing discriminatory laws and slave codes designed to limit the business opportunities of “free” blacks. In 1660, the Boston town meeting passed a law which forbade the use of black artisans. Ten years later, the Virginia legislature made it illegal for blacks to have white indentured servants. In 1712, the Connecticut Assembly decreed that no free black person could buy land or carry on a business in any town without the permission of the white residents.

Still, despite these pressures, some black businessmen persevered and prospered. In 1736, Emanuel Manna Bernoon and his wife, Mary, opened up the first oyster and ale house in Providence, Rhode Island (using, it was said, his wife's money; she had made a small fortune in the illegal whiskey trade). In pre-Revolutionary Newport, a black woman called “Duchess” Quamino became the seaport's leading caterer. During this period, blacks were also becoming the founding fathers of a number of American cities. Jean-Baptiste Pointe DuSable, a Haitian trapper and explorer, became the first non-Indian settler and landholder in what is now Chicago in the early 1770s. Of the forty-four founders of Los Angeles, twenty-six were black, and the heirs of these men inherited large tracts of land. Maria Rita Valdez, a granddaughter of one of these early California blacks, owned Rancho Rodeo de las Aguas, which is better known today as Beverly Hills. Another black, Francisco Reyes, owned the entire San Fernando Valley. Unfortunately, he sold his property in 1790 and became the mayor of Los Angeles. Had he held onto the valley, his heirs would be among the richest people in the world today.

Free blacks virtually invented the catering business in America. After the Revolution, a black Philadelphian named Robert Bogle was said to be “the first man to advocate the organization of domestic service into a business.” Bogle, before 1810, opened a restaurant on Eighth Street near Sansom and, from his establishment, ran all of Philadelphia's great weddings, banquets and balls, and became not only an arbiter of food but an arbiter of taste in other matters such as decor, flower arrangement and dress. Philadelphia matrons consulted Mr. Bogle, the Ward McAllister of his day, not only before planning
their menus but also before composing their guest lists. “The Bogle touch” at Philadelphia social events was adopted and enhanced by a number of succeeding caterers, including Peter Augustin and James Prosser—both black—and of the latter it was said that “the name of James Prosser, among the merchants of Philadelphia, is inseparable with their daily hours of recreation and pleasure.” In 1845, Philadelphia society became the virtual slave of three more black caterers, all operating in the great tradition established by Bogle and Prosser. The leader of this trio was Thomas J. Dorsey, of whom a Philadelphia reporter wrote, “Dorsey was one of the triumvirate of colored caterers—the other two being Henry Jones and Henry Minton—who some years ago might have been said to rule the social world of Philadelphia through its stomach. Time was when lobster salad, chicken croquettes, deviled crabs, and terrapin composed the edible display at every Philadelphia gathering, and none of these dishes were thought to be perfectly prepared unless they came from the hands of one of the three men named.” Dorsey, like most of these black businessmen, was an ardent Abolitionist and, because he could afford to be choosy and “had the sway of an imperial dictator,” he refused to offer his services in the homes of Democrats, saying, “I cannot wait on a party of persons who are disloyal to the government, and”—pointing to the portrait that dominated his reception room—“Lincoln is the government.” Nor were these successful black men unphilanthropic. Henry Gordon, another Philadelphia caterer, contributed $66,000 to a home for “aged and infirm colored people.” Stephen Smith, who at the time was probably the richest black in America—from his lumber and money-lending business he amassed an estate worth half a million nineteenth-century dollars—gave $150,000 to the same fund.

In New York, from the turn of the century well into the 1850s, the gustatory scene was dominated by a number of talented black caterers, including Thomas Downing, who ran a restaurant on Broad Street near Wall Street, and the partnership of George Bell and George Alexander, who operated a similar establishment in Church Street nearby. For many years, New York's most exclusive parties and weddings were put on by Thomas Jackson, who, according to James Weldon Johnson, was “in his day … the arbiter of New York.”

For some reason, nineteenth-century blacks also excelled in matters pertaining to hair, and for many years the leading barbers and hairdressers in most eastern American cities were black. In New
York, the most fashionable hairdresser was Pierre Toussaint, a former slave, who, according to his biographer, Hannah F. S. Lee, was held in such high regard for his tonsorial skills that “he had all of the custom and patronage of the French families … [and] many of the distinguished ladies of the city employed him.” Still, however successful these tradespeople might be, they tended to keep a low profile, just as the nineteenth-century Jews did, and were aware that they were “outsiders.” As a French traveler of the period, Jacques Brissot de Warville, noted, “Those Negroes who keep shops live moderately, and never augment their business beyond a certain point. The reason is obvious; the whites … like not to give them credit to undertake any extensive commerce nor even to give them the means of a common education by receiving them into their counting houses.” Still, there were waves of reaction. In 1834, when the whites of both New York and Philadelphia rose up against black workers and black businessmen, there were major race riots. Philadelphia erupted again in 1838 and 1843, and there were black-white riots in Pittsburgh in 1839.

There were also wealthy free blacks in the South, including black planters like Cyprian Ricard, who owned a Louisiana plantation worth $225,000 and no less than ninety-one black slaves. In New Orleans in the 1840s there were at least eight black brokers who dealt in cotton futures and offered some of the services of commercial banks. There were prosperous cigar-makers in New Orleans too, such as George Alcés, who had a factory that employed two hundred workers, and a black inventor and engineer named Norbert Rillieux, who patented a vacuum cup that revolutionized the sugar industry. In Berne, North Carolina, a barber named John C. Stanley managed to accumulate properties worth $40,000, and a New Orleans merchant who loaned money at interest left an estate worth $500,000.

Though black wealth before the Civil War may not have been sufficient to constitute a great economic force, there were many blacks who were far from impoverished. In New York in 1853, it was estimated that blacks owned property worth $1,000,000 and had invested $839,000 in businesses in and around New York City. In Philadelphia, by 1856, blacks owned real estate worth $800,000. Just before the outbreak of the Civil War, blacks in Washington, D.C., owned property valued at $630,000. New Orleans, interestingly enough, was at that point the richest black city in America, with
blacks in 1860 owning $15,000,000 worth of taxable property. The total personal and real wealth of free blacks in America that year has been placed at $50,000,000, and this is considered an estimate on the conservative side. Blacks owned nine thousand homes, fifteen thousand farms, and two thousand businesses.

But what happened? One might suppose, with their early lead in catering, that blacks by the 1970s would control the United States catering industry, and that they would dominate the barbering and hairdressing professions. Nineteenth-century blacks were also strong in New York's fashion industry, yet black designers and manufacturers are insignificant on Seventh Avenue today. They had also, at one point, prospered in the wholesale and retail grocery business, and yet they do not—as might have been expected—control major food or chainstore operations today. Racism is not the single, simple answer. To begin with, America's early black businessmen tended to concentrate in service businesses which depended on whites as customers. They had not yet discovered, as men like John Johnson did later on, that there was money to be made selling products to their “own kind.” An element of snobbery had also entered the world of the free blacks in the 1850s. Perhaps because they had been spoiled by the attentions of white society ladies, black hairdressers would not dress the hair of other blacks. Black caterers did not care to cater parties at black homes, since their white trade carried more cachet. As for barbers, by the mid-1800s the “colored barber” had become a kind of ethnic joke, and he appeared in cartoons with a comb in one hand and a pair of scissors in the other. Many black barbers became self-conscious and embarrassed by their profession, and quietly withdrew from it. The barber's son did not want to be a barber like his father, and a promising family enterprise would be abandoned by the second generation in favor of something else. Something else, it often turned out, in which there was much stiffer competition. In the nineteenth century, competition was arriving in the form of some five million white immigrants from Europe who were hungry, ambitious, eager to hustle and to form trade unions that restricted blacks to menial occupations. All these forces combined to push black entrepreneurs backward from what had seemed a promising head start.

Ironically, the Civil War, which freed all blacks, was also a force that kept them economically imprisoned. Before the war, black businessmen in the North and South had had white competitors who were somewhat, but only somewhat, better off. The war, however, proved
to be a field day for the profiteer and robber baron. All the great American fortunes—Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, Gould, Lehman, Schiff, Armour, Morgan—were amassed during the war years through government loans, war contracts, the expansion of the railroads, and the enormously inflated price of manufactured goods. It was open season for the speculator and the unscrupulous manipulator, and the Civil War made moguls out of men who had been small-time merchants and manufacturers. Yet, for some reason, no black moguls emerged from the war. Perhaps it was because, as has been argued, blacks found it distasteful to engage in profiteering from a war that was ostensibly being fought to free the slaves, though such scruples in such an amoral era are somewhat hard to credit. Perhaps it was because, at the war's outset, the economic position of the free blacks was still too weak. Perhaps it was because early black businessmen had received a poorer education than their white contemporaries and were, in some cases, illiterate—though men like Jay Gould, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and the original John D. Rockefeller were hardly intellectual giants and had had little formal schooling. (“If I had learned education I would not have had time to learn anything else,” Vanderbilt once said.) Probably it was a combination of these factors, but the fact is that, at the war's end, black businessmen ended up with the same small businesses they had started out with, while their white competitors had improved their fortunes, and their arenas of power, enormously.

And of course white supremacist attitudes and racism cannot be ruled out as causes for the generally discouraging record of blacks in business. There were instances, like the case of the Freedmen's Bank, in which black enterprises were forced out of business through white chicanery, or even taken over by whites at gunpoint. In Cincinnati, a black furniture manufacturer named Robert Boyd did a thriving business throughout the South and West. One nineteenth-century night, a band of whites, angered at and jealous of Boyd's success, set fire to his factory and it burned to the ground. Boyd rebuilt his plant, and it was burned again. He rebuilt it a third time, and it was burned a third time. His fourth factory was his last. When that, too, was burned he could no longer get insurance and was forced to go out of business.