Introduction
The city has grown so large, and its population of color has grown so rapidly, that it is not now possible for even a small minority of the members of the race in question to say nothing of the citizens as a whole – to know what is being done by the Negroes of Philadelphia. The progress of our colored population in business, in home-owning, in their churches, and social life is such that it is difficult for even one who gives his whole time to the subject, to keep his information to date. For not a week passes but a new business is opened, a new home bought, and some new evidence of progress shows itself.Footnote 1
The unknowable city and the progress of the Black race is the subject of the preface to the Philadelphia Colored Directory (1908).Footnote 2 Published by Robert R. Wright, Jr., a pioneering social worker, entrepreneur and ‘race man’, the directory was intended to make the city of Philadelphia legible to Black residents, both old and new.Footnote 3 Wright was not alone in this endeavour. During the USA’s rapid urbanization in the late nineteenth century and onwards, dozens of Black business directories like Wright’s were published to provide guidance and legibility to the nation’s newly emergent ‘Negro main streets’.Footnote 4 For both new and old residents, directories not only made legible these new economic, cultural and social centres of Black urban life,Footnote 5 they also acted as a conduit to inscribe new forms of Black urban citizenship into the spatial rationalization and governmentality of modernizing American cities (see Figure 1).
Figure 1. Title page of The Philadelphia Colored Directory: A Handbook of Religious, Social, Political, Professional, Business and other Activities of the Negroes of Philadelphia (1910), published by W.H. Wright, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Source: Free Library of Philadelphia: https://libwww.freelibrary.org/digital/item/63935 accessed 14 Aug. 2025.
This article is one of the first analysesFootnote 6 that uses these directories as a collective data source from which to investigate how, during the long Jim Crow era, Black communal life was inscribed or ‘indexed’ into both the text-spaceFootnote 7 and into what Griffiths and Vaughan and others have called the ‘spatial syntax’ of American towns and cities.Footnote 8 The existence of Black business directories, especially those published outside of the South, challenges the erasure of Black residents from modernizing urban spaces, and the then-contemporary belief that Black settlements were a ‘Southern’ and rural problem.Footnote 9 It contributes to new understandings of the ways in which Black Americans engaged in what Trotter has called ‘city building processes’, a complex intertwining of ‘diverse physical, geographical, institutional, cultural, and political threads’.Footnote 10 Analyses of these directories serve as an alternative way to understand how these texts established, inscribed and reinforced Black urban citizenship by providing a unique kind of legibility to the unknown city, and by actively inserting Negro main streets into the ‘city as text’ or ‘text-space’ of cities. These directories were not merely an assemblage of facts; rather, the text of these directories reflects a larger and contested process of claiming and defining African American urban citizenship, identities and spaces. The directories created a new space syntax for Black urban life with a melding of addresses, images, exhortations and quotidian information, ranging from how to write a cheque to calculating postage rates. Inculcating Black urban citizenship came from highlighting notable Black community leaders and possible sympathetic White political allies; stressing the Black community’s property ownership and contribution to local tax revenues; identifying government offices and services; and, by the mid-twentieth century, exhorting readers to lobby local officials and, most importantly, to register to vote.
The next section discusses research on the role of directories in shaping modern Black urban life. The following section provides an empirical overview of the evolution of these directories across time and region. The discussion then turns to tracing the development of these directories across four eras. The earliest directories were published prior to the Civil War and reflect pro-abolition politics and print culture. The directories published during the post-Reconstruction era – 1880 to 1910 – symbolize a new kind of ‘race accounting’ that supported racial uplift and respectability politics. The directories from the Great Migration of the early 1910s through to the 1950s mirror the rapid development and spread of Negro main streets and the rise of Black urban citizenship, which projected a confident sense of spatial rootedness in both old and new urban spaces. The directories published in the 1960s and onwards, however, reflect the decline of Negro main streets as the urban renewal order restructured American cities, while the civil rights movement and the rise of the ‘desegregated dollar’ reshaped the spatial and political status of their Black residents. By the mid-1970s, many Negro main streets had disappeared and Black business directories were reimagined as sources of economic development for ‘minority’ businesses and spatially dispersed communities.
Inscribing Black life in the ‘great ledger’
Town, city and business directories play an important role in serving as data sources for historians interested in tracing socio-economic changes within and across urban sites.Footnote 11 More recently, the use of directories has moved to investigate the shaping of urban spatiality and culture outside of the United Kingdom and Europe.Footnote 12 The more recent spatial turn in urban historyFootnote 13 supported by geographic information systems has brought new attention to the ways in which directories can serve as a source of micro-data,Footnote 14 for analysing urban morphologyFootnote 15 and as an additional data source for space syntax analyses.Footnote 16
City directories have been described as business ventures that inscribed a certain kind of legibility and governmentality on the urban landscape.Footnote 17 Publishers of directories imagined cities as a ‘city-text’ for which an ‘index to the great ledger of the community’ was needed.Footnote 18 The adoption of house numbering systems as well as street naming conventions produced a ‘spatial regime of inscriptions’ though which the ‘spatially individuation[ing] of urban populations’ could be coupled with the ‘formation of place-specific knowledges of governmentality’.Footnote 19 For both new and old urban residents, directories, with their alphabetized indexes of names and streets, ‘provided order from the chaos of rapid urbanization’,Footnote 20 while making rapidly urbanizing landscapes ‘intelligible, decipherable, finite, however mysterious, inchoate and vast [they] might outwardly appear’.Footnote 21 In the face of this uncertainty and change, publishers asserted that their directories ‘produced authoritative “facts” that provided a record [of] urban life for contemporaries and for posterity as they shaped interpretations of the geographies of the past’.Footnote 22
This ‘spatial regime of inscriptions’, or legibility, however, often explicitly excluded Black residents (and other marginalized people), organizations and businesses from this nascent urban geography. For example, Rose-Redwood notes that the publisher of Longworth’s American Almanac, New York Register and City Directory (1829) ‘arrogantly professed [that] the names of laborers, colored people, persons in low obscurity who rent tenements by the week … may be excluded without impairing the utility of the work’.Footnote 23 At best, city directories like North Carolina’s Seeman’s Durham 1911 directory marginalized Black residents by literally placing them at the back of the directory – in a separate and much smaller ‘text-space’.Footnote 24 The recognition of Black directories as distinctive entities within the family of city directories is largely unacknowledged; their existence was not included in classic histories of American city directories,Footnote 25 nor in the historiography of Black business and entrepreneurship.Footnote 26
Indexing the congregation of Black urban life
By the 1910s, the economic, political and spatial colour lines of the modern American city created a dense network of Black urban life. Forced segregation (or, as Lewis argues, ‘congregation’)Footnote 27 meant that Black associational life flourished, as did Black businesses that catered to the segregated market. These congregational spaces were often the only urban spaces where Black life could take place under the shadow of forced segregation where overcrowded and substandard housing and environmental conditions, as well as the violence and surveillance of the White city, shaped the daily lives of Black residents.Footnote 28 This not to say that Negro main streets were oases from the violence of Jim Crow. The destruction of Tulsa’s Greenwood District, also known as ‘Black Wall Street’, in 1921 is a powerful reminder that these Black spaces existed at the will of White acceptance of Black autonomy and success.Footnote 29 While many publishers acknowledged that forced segregation justified the need for these publications, under congregation, they also became symbols of communal aspiration.
A close examination of these directories reveals the connections between civic and social leadership and the construction of Black urban space, whether in a specific cityFootnote 30 or more broadly across time or space.Footnote 31 The spatial syntax of the Black business directories reflects the multiple ongoing debates over how Black empowerment should take place, from racial uplift strategies (including respectability politics),Footnote 32 the role of Black self-determination,Footnote 33 Black capitalism and entrepreneurialismFootnote 34, the rise of Black consumer culture and the ‘Negro market’,Footnote 35 to the role of women entrepreneurs and club work.Footnote 36 The analyses shine a light on the ways in which ‘Jim Crow nostalgia’ was constructed, even during the era, as different factions within Black communities (including publishers) searched for imagined moments of communal and spatial solidarity.Footnote 37
The publication origins of these directories reflect these multifaced debates. For example, ‘colored’ or ‘Negro’ directories were often created by solo entrepreneurs as straightforward business ventures, unlike the more ubiquitous city directories which had consolidated into a small group of publishers by the late nineteenth century.Footnote 38 These individual efforts (supported by a combination of advertisement sales and consumers) were often supported by collective theorization and organizing. The influence of Booker T. Washington and the establishment of the National Negro Business League (NNBL) in 1900 are certainly an important part of understanding the Negro main street story as local chapters sponsoring directories as part of their organizing efforts.Footnote 39 In some places, directories were the result of efforts by local groups such as chapters of the National Housewives League or the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). As a result of their origins within often middle-class organizing efforts, many of these publications reflected a desire for a particular kind of imagined community of success and uplift, while often inscribing a consumerist perspective onto these communities. This indexing of race advancement and respectability led to the exclusion of the informal and illicit economy (as well as the sights and sounds) of speakeasies, juke joints, blind pigs, the policy or ‘numbers’ game, odd jobs and rent parties to which many Black urbanites turned to sustain themselves.Footnote 40
The space-text of these directories further shaped Black urban identity. For example, the place-making elements of these directories often began with editors’ prefaces extolling the success that ‘the race’ had achieved in a particular city. While many of the editors were entrepreneurs, some also saw themselves as race men or women, wherein the publishing of a business directory dovetailed with beliefs about Black self-determination, racial uplift and the politics of respectability. Robert Coleman, the long-time publisher of the Baltimore Colored Directory, played a prominent role in establishing the Maryland Association for Colored Blind, perhaps due to the gradual loss of his vision, but certainly due to his role as a ‘race man’.Footnote 41 Women like Charlotta Bass of Los Angeles and Mary Ellen Shadd of Milwaukee also played important roles in shaping the Negro main street as publishers, community leaders and ‘race women’.Footnote 42
Wright, the publisher of the 1908 Philadelphia Colored Directory, shared a similar perspective towards racial uplift. In his preface, Wright notes that while the directory would be comprised ‘chiefly [of] facts; and but little of comment’, it was the first stage in the achievement of a larger goal which was ‘in the course of a year, to publish a sociological treatise on the Negroes in Pennsylvania’.Footnote 43 The directory was thus ‘a logical forerunner of such a treatise, as it presents in detailed form much of the data upon which conclusions of sociological value are based’. Wright then concluded his preface stating that the ‘handbook is, however, complete in itself; and should it be received by the public with favor, a like record will be given out each year, or as often as occasion may demand’. Wright was correct in this latter hope, as two additional issues of the directory were published in 1910 and 1914, along with the promised monograph, The Negro in Pennsylvania; A Study in Economic History (1912).
Reflecting the race advancement aspect of these publications, publishers sometimes included profiles of local Black notables (and, less often, prominent sympathetic White local politicians or business owners). The listings of professionals (e.g. doctors, lawyers, dentists, social workers, teachers) also reveal other spatialized aspects of racial progress. For example, many of these professionals could be located in the few office buildings owned and operated by Black insurance companies or banks, or fraternal organizations like the Prince Hall Masons. Most of the directories provided images of these office building as signs of ‘race progress’, but also as a means of signalling urban fixedness. Directories also listed (and contained advertisements for) community institutions such as local churches, from the largest denominations such as the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church to the small storefronts. Other listings provided a portrait of the ‘charitable landscape’ created by the Black community, especially by ‘colored’ women’s clubs such as old age homes, nurseries, orphanages, facilities for the disabled, ‘colored’ YMCAs, segregated high schools and other kinds of community centres.Footnote 44 The directory listings sent other kinds of signals as well. For example, the listing of small business owners and professionals gave a permanence and specificity to these communities. Indeed, some publishers emphasized the ‘quality’ of their listings by ensuring that marginal enterprises were included. Indeed, the publisher of a 1918 Chicago directory noted that:
‘Fly-by-nights’ or those businesses that open today and close tomorrow, so to speak, have been eliminated and the more stable businesses included. We intend to emphasize this from year to year because we believe the public will appreciate it.Footnote 45
This stance was unfortunate given that historically most Black businesses were relatively fragile and undercapitalized enterprises, including many of the directories as well.Footnote 46 Thus, the goals of uplift and respectability may have worked against constructive mutual support.
For many smaller communities, the importance of a Black directory went beyond a listing of businesses, professionals and other notables. They often had the addresses of local Black residents which were not always included in directories aimed at the White market, or they were included with the designation of (c) for ‘colored’ next to their name.Footnote 47 The advertisements also sent different messages about Black urban spaces. For example, some restaurant advertisements extolled their ‘down-home’ country styles in a bid to attract homesick migrants. Others touted the equal treatment of all customers ‘colored or white’. The listing of fraternal groups, women’s clubs and other social organizations (and sometimes their membership) recognized the bonds of congregational life and offered alternative identities not based on occupation or employment (or lack thereof). Black directories thus gave Black residents recognition, community and dignity in the face of erasure, neglect or subordination.
Empirical analysis
This article analyses a database of 221 Black business directories published between 1838 and 1975, collected as part of a digital humanities project, Negro Main Street: A Digital Archive. Footnote 48 The database excludes almanacs (local, state or national), occupational or industry guides as well as use-specific (travel) guides (e.g. The Green Book).Footnote 49 From less than a dozen published in the late nineteenth century, Black business directories rapidly spread throughout the USA as new Black communities were established (or rapidly expanded) in the urban North, Midwest and West (see Figure 2). The number of directories published peaked in the 1940s, but by the mid-1970s they had largely disappeared. The surge in directory publishing during the 1940s reflected the second phase of the Great Migration, and the development of new or expanded Black communities outside of the South who benefitted from war-time spending.Footnote 50
Figure 2. Black business directories published by decade, 1830–1975.
Source: Compiled by the author.
Directories appeared in both small and large cities. In most cities, the relatively small size of a Black population could stimulate one or two editions, but rarely more than three, let alone a serial by the same publisher. For example, there was only one edition of the Negro Directory of Sioux Falls, South Dakota (1956), a guide for the ‘663 Negroes in the State of South Dakota’. Not surprisingly, in Baltimore and Chicago, two cities with the largest and most established Black populations, Black business directories were published for the longest period. From 1939 to 1965, Black Chicagoans could get free copies of Scott’s Blue Book: A Classified Business and Service Directory of Greater Chicago’s Colored Citizens’ Commercial, Industrial, Professional, Religious, and Other Activities. In Baltimore, from 1913 to 1946, Robert Coleman published The First Colored Business and Professional Directory of Baltimore, Md., With Washington, D.C. Annex. Footnote 51 Even in the larger cities there was a lack of consistency. In Chicago, prior to the arrival of Scott’s, eight different Black business directories were published between 1886 and 1927. In New York City, home to the nation’s largest number of Black residents, only eight directories (all unrelated) were published between 1913 and 1963.
The distribution of directories reflected the regional and temporal distribution of Black Americans (see Table 1). The smallest number of directories was in the West, where over a 45-year period, 16 directories were published across four states. The North also had a longer history of publications (124 years) but a smaller number of directories, with 23 directories published across five states. Within 86 years, 55 directories (excluding Chicago series) were published across 11 states in the Midwest. Though the South historically had the largest Black population, there were only 27 directories (excluding the Baltimore series) published across the 15 states, perhaps owing to many city directories incorporating a ‘colored’ section at the back of these publications, thus lessening the need for a separate ledger.
Table 1. Distribution of Black business directories by region and year, 1830–1975
Note: * Includes only first publication of Scott’s and Coleman’s Baltimore series.
Source: Compiled by the author.
Excluding Baltimore and Chicago, 23 directories were published between 1945 and 1955. From 1956 through to 1975, the number drops by half, to 12 directories across the United States. No matter the region, by the end of the 1950s, only Baltimore and Chicago could boast of a Black business directory that had been continuously published for at least a decade, and only the Midwest still produced directories after 1970.
Indexing the ante-bellum Black community
Published by the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, the Register of Trades of the Colored People in the City of Philadelphia and Districts (1838) is the earliest Black directory that can be identified. Unlike post-emancipation directories, it does not provide an index to the communal landscape of ‘free’ Philadelphia, with no listings for churches (including Mother Bethel, the first AME church in the USA), privately funded schools for Black children, burial grounds, literary societies, social clubs and political clubs. Instead, this information was collected and published separatelyFootnote 52 as the purpose of the directory was to ‘encourage white patronage of black artisans’.Footnote 53 The Register, a slim 16-page pamphlet, documents the ‘better classes’ of Black Philadelphia (see Figure 3).
Figure 3. First page from the Register of Trades of the Colored People in the City of Philadelphia and Districts.
Source: Register of Trades of the Colored People in the City of Philadelphia and Districts, Philadelphia, Merrihew and Gunn, printers, 1838. Library of Congress: https://www.loc.gov/item/unk82101871/ accessed 4 Aug. 2025.
Reflecting the still-fluid notions of urban space of cities in the antebellum USA, most of those listed do not have fixed addresses; rather, they are listed by general area (e.g. ‘Middle Alley’, ‘Bedford below 12th’).
The impact of the Quaker abolition movement can be seen in the way that prominent Black civic leaders and business owners are not set apart: the directory lists only individuals, by occupation or trade, ranging from bakers to wheelwrights. Reflecting the racial discrimination that faced Black workers in this era, the directory notes in a subheading that most individuals are denoted as ‘journeymen’ as, ‘by choice or necessity’, they were ‘forced to labour in other areas despite their professed trade’.Footnote 54 This disjunction between occupational aspiration and labour market reality foreshadows the durability of dual urban labour markets.Footnote 55 Indeed, the ‘Negro businessmen’ that Du Bois finds (and later discounts) in his 1899 study largely reflects what he argues was the aspiration of the individuals who had answered the survey (to be considered ‘businessmen’), rather than their lived reality (as labourers).Footnote 56
Directories as ‘racial accounting’: the post-Reconstruction era
The publication in Chicago of The Colored Men’s Professional and Business Directory (1885) marks the emergence of Black business directories in a recognizably modern assertion of urban text-space.Footnote 57 The editor, I.C. Harris, makes the case for this directory as necessary to recognize the ‘remarkable progress made by our race in the past twenty years’.Footnote 58 In keeping with the aim of legibility, Harris assures his readers that ‘special pains and great care’ had been made to collect authoritative facts. He then makes an expansive claim to urban citizenship by ending his preface with his hope that the directory will highlight the ‘commendable enterprise of the colored citizens of Chicago whose business tact, industrial genius and progressive efforts will make them an important and powerful link in the great commercial chain which connects Chicago with the length and breadth of civilisation’.Footnote 59
In addition to these assertions of urban citizenship, most of the business directories of the post-Reconstruction era reflect a ‘racial accounting’ approach, which aimed to demonstrate through multiple kinds of evidence how ‘far the race’ had come since emancipation, and in the context of a particular city. The directories often listed the aggregate real estate (whether in value or number of buildings) owned by the local Black community, again as a marker of community success and uplift. In some cases, similar to the almanac brethren, images of local homes or churches were also included. In addition to listing the names and addresses of local businesses, directories also highlighted the names (sometimes accompanied by images) of local notable men and women.
The 1901 Twentieth Century Union League Directory is an example of this ‘racial accounting’ approach.Footnote 60 The directory, like its earlier two editions, focused on the achievements of the Black ‘race’ since emancipation. In a section titled ‘POPULATION, HOMES AND REAL ESTATE’, the directory notes that ‘Next to their efforts to improve their condition in morals and education, the colored people of Washington have made the most progress in the acquisition of homes, lands and houses.’Footnote 61 This racial progress is summarized as:
the value of property of the colored people is placed, conservatively, at $15,000,000. Many of these homes are the centres of refinement and culture; no less than six of them are valued above $10,000, each and at least two thirds – above $3,000 each. Those families who own their homes constitute only a fraction of the colored families of Washington who have good homes, surrounded by many of the evidences of comfort in modern home life, books, pictures, newspapers, magazines, pianos, etc. One of the decided points of progress made by the colored people of Washington is to be seen in their home life.Footnote 62
The role of directory publishers in creating a text-space of urban respectability and uplift begins during this era and would become typical of the directories published from this point onwards. Yet the optimism of racial uplift was imperfectly overridden by reality. The ‘A.L. Walker Boot Blacking Stand’ is one of the few businesses that the directory calls out (see Figures 4a and b).
Figure 4. (a). The title page from the Twentieth Century Union League Directory. Source: HathiTrust.
(b). ‘The A.L. Walker boot blacking stands and messenger service, Main Stand Opp. B. & O. Depot’, from the Twentieth Century Union League Directory. Source: HathiTrust.
The text accompanying the image extols the ‘successful enterprise, conducted by a man of our race’. Walker operated several stands ‘giving employment to from ten to fifteen boys’. Yet reflecting the dual and unequal labour market faced by urban Black residents, the text notes that Walker ‘graduated from the College of Pharmacy, city of New York, with such knowledge of pharmacy and practical chemistry … has applied his knowledge to the manufacture of shoe dressings, dyes and colorings’.Footnote 63 Like the journeymen of Philadelphia’s 1835 Register, one wonders whether Walker’s enterprise emerged out of an entrepreneurial vision or was due to the ‘forced necessity’ of the racially exclusionary labour market of the Jim Crow city?
The great migrations to town and city
The first wave of the Great Migration began around 1910, but increased as the USA began mobilizing for World War I. As this new era unfolded, many directories shifted away from a ‘race accounting’ approach that looked back at ‘the race’s’ distance from enslavement towards new texts in which the legibility of Black residence in these growing cities could be provided and Black urban citizenship could be more confidently asserted. The influence of Washington and the NNBL could also be seen in the directories published under their umbrella.
The Chicago Negro Business Men and Women and Where They are Located, published in 1913, is an example of the influence of the NNBL. The urban text-space of the directory begins with a brief statement from the (White) Chicago Commerce Association which notes that ‘a San Domingo negro trader named Jean Baptiste Pointe DuSable … [is] our first city father; Chicago’s first landed citizen’.Footnote 64 The editor’s preface pivots away from this historical footnote and focuses on NNBL’s programme of economic uplift. Instead of explicit claims for urban political citizenship, the editor focuses instead on economic citizenship. Under the heading ‘A FEW FACTS’, the text emphasizes the spending of ‘75,000 negroes in Chicago’, and delineates their estimated outlay on ‘shoes, sundries, cigars, toiletries, and food stuff’.Footnote 65 It concludes with the question: ‘The Chicago negro is spending over $27,400,000 per year. Who is most benefited by doing so? Who?’ The NNBL’s message is that businesses not owned by Blacks were benefitting the most – by extracting consumer spending from the community, but not employing the people who lived there. To solve this problem, the preface turns to ‘The negro business men and women of the city who [are] giving employment to … 1,716 persons. They pay them $5,130,360 annually.’Footnote 66
By the 1920s, the growth and fragility of Negro main streets can be seen in directories like Newark, New Jersey’s Classified Directory of Negro Business Interests, Professions of Essex County (1920) ‘Compiled by Ralph Wm. Nixon For the Bureau of Negro Intelligence’.Footnote 67 Rather than the now-distant era of the post-emancipation past, Nixon focuses on the city’s future and the position of ‘the race’, putting forward the directory as a tool that,
we are putting in the hands of the people, a literature which we believe to be prophetic of a concerted effort on the part of the American Negro to develop commercially, for taking into consideration the numerous advantages this line of endeavor offers for civic and political emancipation, the progressive Negro is going to devote a greater part of his energy than heretofore expended in the establishment of enterprises and professions which will give employment to their young men and women, and along lines of work, wherein their education will fit and their experience qualify them for such positions at present refusing them employment.
Along with listings, the directory provided a guide to urban life, with practical information for the new urban dweller such as how to deal with banks (explaining how to write a cheque, deposits, identification and forgery) to the various classes of mail.
In addition to guidance, Nixon also included three short exhortatory essays that sought to encourage racial uplift among young Black women and men: ‘The Colored Girl in the New Industrial Situation’, ‘Your Boys Future’ and ‘Success’. The essays note that the ‘recent war’ had opened up unprecedented opportunities that Black youth had to be ready to seize when offered. At the same time, in a plea for solidarity, Nixon noted that racial discrimination made the development of Black businesses imperative in order to provide employment for those people who had the qualifications and interest, but who are ‘refused employment’.
The Great Depression: finding solidarity in hard times
The Great Depression and its catastrophic impact on Black urbanites spurred most publishers to explicitly promote in-group solidarity and economic power. Some directories provided a more indirect assessment of the local Black community’s inclusion within the larger urban economy. For example, the 1936 Springfield (Missouri) Negro City and County Directory included a page that listed major Springfield employers with ‘[t]he Letter ‘N’ Indicat[ing] the Ones that Employ Negroes’.Footnote 68 A listing like this signalled both opportunities for possible employment as well as a helpful warning against the sting of discrimination.
This wave of urban solidarity can be seen in directories like the Booker T. Washington Trade Association Directory (1938),Footnote 69 which was co-sponsored by the National Housewives League (founded in 1933) and the Detroit Housewives League.Footnote 70 For these activists, the link between economic security and dignity was ‘The Home, the Store, the School, the Church, and the Factory […] all infallible signs of Civilization’. The directory not only lists businesses and professionals, but also provides an overview of the organization’s activities, including ‘booster campaigns’ whereby Association members canvassed neighbourhoods where Black businesses were located, in order to encourage residents to support these businesses. As the Association stated in their introduction, ‘Jobs are essential.’Footnote 71
The publisher of the East Bay Colored Business Directory (Oakland, 1930) echoed these calls for solidarity, appealing on behalf of the Black business owner ‘so earnestly to his own people to patronize him’.Footnote 72 Similar to an earlier era of ‘racial accounting’, the Directory tried to put an optimistic face on the ‘essential facts of the Negro’s economic life’:
Last year’s payroll in Oakland was $124,000,000. Of that amount the Negroes received approximately $2,000,000. 60 percent of these resources come from the R.R. companies – $535,000 from the Southern Pacific Co., and $560,000 from the Pullman Co. The remaining 40 percent is from various other occupations such as clerical, domestic, construction and mechanical.
The directory noted that ‘Negroes pay taxes on property in this region valued at $1,750,000 approximately.Footnote 73 For Black directory publishers and ‘race leaders’, these ‘facts’, especially the payment of property taxes, whether directly as owners, or indirectly as renters, undergirded the Black community’s right to urban citizenship. In the face of arguments made by White politicians that local relief was almost entirely spent on the Black poor, assertions about the contributions made by the Black community were deployed to counter these charges of dependency and the belief that Black residents were simply temporary sojourners in a particular city, with no rights to social support. If assertion of economic value was not enough, directories offered a spatialized inscription of urban citizenship with its index of Black business establishments, churches, clubs and social welfare organizations.
Negro main street arrives: 1940–55
As spending from World War II finally trickled into Black neighbourhoods, directories and the Black press expanded.Footnote 74 These directories reflected their publishers’ belief in the now seemingly naturalized embeddedness of Black communal enclaves in American cities, most visibly, the emergence of Chicago as the nation’s pre-eminent ‘black metropolis’.Footnote 75 The directories also reflected the publishers’ desire for an imagined Black community that reflected stability, progress and order, and the future promise of a successful fight for ‘Double-V’—the fight against fascism abroad and racism at home.Footnote 76 The Akron Negro Directory (1940) reflected this assertion of urban space and identity, noting that the directory offered information ‘concerning the Negro and the progress he has made during the growth of Akron and his contribution toward the Civic and Political development of the city’.Footnote 77 The publisher also noted that institutions both in and outside of the Black community (e.g. the ‘Akron University, Akron Police Department, Municipal and County Authorities, Akron Colored Community Center and its Affiliated Organizations’) were drawn upon to compile the information deemed necessary for its readers.Footnote 78
Moving beyond a tutelary role in helping Black migrants learn how to be urban residents, these directories now turned their attention to reminding their readers that they were also urban citizens. Akron’s Negro Directory not only listed the location of important government offices, but also made note of the size of Akron’s Black population (14,076), as well as the number of registered Black voters (7,356). In addition, the ‘statistical information’ provided in the directory noted the approximate amount of tax paid by the Black population ($212,588.40), as well as the amount spent annually by Akron’s Black population on utilities such as electricity ($77,238), gas ($44,520) and the telephone service ($14,850).Footnote 79
The Dallas Texas Negro City Directory, 1947–1948, sponsored by the Dallas Negro Chamber of Commerce, reflected the height of post-war optimism, listing hundreds of Dallas-based businesses as well as residents.Footnote 80 The directory included the 37 other Negro chambers of commerce located in Texas, and state leagues throughout the South. While notable local Black leaders were highlighted, so too was the military service of individual business owners. In a full page, the Progressive Voter’s League touted its accomplishments in promoting poll tax campaigns, civic responsibility, use of the ballot and its advocating of ‘equal facilities and accommodations’.Footnote 81 While acknowledging that ‘Dallas interracially has had its rough spots’, in keeping with the spirit of racial uplift, it emphasized that many Black leaders approached the post-war urban renewal regime with optimism.
Urban displacement and the end of Negro main street
The emergence of the national urban renewal regime was met with both eagerness and dread by Black communities; optimists saw these programmes as a tool for racial uplift, while sceptics foresaw widespread demolition and displacement.Footnote 82 In Dallas, optimism initially prevailed, with the publishers of the Dallas Texas Negro City proudly noting that, with the cooperation of the Negro Chamber of Commerce, private and public meetings had taken place which resulted in the ‘adoption of a whole program for the expansion of Negro parks, public auditoriums, streets, hospital and recreational facilities by the Greater Dallas Association’.Footnote 83 Despite claims that their intervention enabled the ‘Negro public’ to be ‘intelligent on the proposals’, these discussions were ultimately ignored as the city went ahead with urban renewal and highway construction displacing much of Black Dallas, including the chamber’s Negro main street of North Dallas/Freedman’s Town.Footnote 84
By 1960, examples from Dallas and dozens of other cities were confirming the sceptics’ pessimism. Urban renewal and highway construction plans frequently targeted Black and minority spaces, which included many Negro main streets, leading to widespread outright destruction or long-term decline.Footnote 85 Urban spatial displacement occurred alongside a wider ‘desegregation of the dollar’, as the civil rights movement advocated for the entry of Black customers into previously restricted spaces, and as consumer goods companies began developing and/or marketing goods and services for the Black consumer market, thus displacing Black businesses.Footnote 86
Directory publishers responded to the impact of desegregation of the marketplace for its customers as well as ongoing urban displacement. Some directories attempted to address this change with titular window dressing, as in the case of Scott’s Blue Book (Chicago, Illinois) which changed its title from Directory of Greater Chicago’s Colored Citizens (c. 1914–1955) to Directory of Chicago Citizens: With Inter-Racial Features (c. 1956–65).Footnote 87 Other directories sought refuge in the construction of a larger, and perhaps non-place bound, conception of a new ‘Negro market’ as well as a new middle class arising out of early successes of the post-war civil rights movement.Footnote 88
The Negro Directory of the Niagara Frontier, 1958–1959, published in Buffalo, New York, is one example of the search for a new ‘Negro market’ (see Figure 5).Footnote 89
Figure 5. Title page from the Negro Directory of the Niagara Frontier, 1958–1959, published by the Niagara Negro Sales Service (Buffalo, 1958).
The publisher, Mrs Essie W. Cannon, was a graduate of Marquette University; her spouse was employed as an electrical engineer for Bell Aircraft (thereby holding an occupation and status largely unattainable for earlier generations of Black labour). Two salespeople were also involved: one was a technical illustrator for Bell, while the other was district manager for a Black hair care company. Both stated that they wanted to ‘bring to the Niagara Frontier complete data of the Negro Market’s worth and potential’, while envisioning the directory as a ‘entry point to the multi-million dollar Negro Market’.Footnote 90 In its celebration of an imagined ‘Negro Market’, the first notable highlighted by the directory was Mrs Cora P. Maloney whose election to the Buffalo City Council ‘simultaneously marked the end of Republican monopoly in the district; smashed the myth of masculine supremacy in the city politics, and brought about the unconditional beginning of Negro control of the Masten District’.Footnote 91 Despite this achievement, urban renewal and highway construction began to unravel Black neighbourhoods like Masten.
By the late 1960s and into the early 1970s, with the rise of the Black Power movement and the influence of President Richard Nixon’s Black capitalism initiative, the purposes and audiences of Black directories were transformed.Footnote 92 New kinds of directories appeared, most of them sponsored by government agencies, non-profits or newly elected Black urban regimes.Footnote 93 In cities like Newark, whose first Black mayor Kenneth Gibson was elected in 1970, the goals of these officially sponsored directories went beyond supporting local businesses (as was the case for earlier publications). By signalling the mayoral administration’s official support for ‘economic development’, they aimed to solidify the support of a city’s small Black business class as well as create broader political coalitions.Footnote 94 On a broader level, officials in places like Atlanta used these directories to market the city to corporate interests wary of Black controlled cities;Footnote 95 they saw them as a way to market Black businesses like construction firms to public agencies seeking to expand opportunities to minority-owned businesses that were laid out in initiatives such as Nixon’s Philadelphia Plan, as well as a range of local, state and federal minority business enterprise (MBE) programmes.Footnote 96
The Gary Minority Business Directory (1971), sponsored by the city of Gary, led by Mayor Richard Hatcher, elected in 1967 as the USA’s first Black big city mayor, is an example of this shift.Footnote 97 Hatcher authored the directory’s preface, where he made the case that the directory stood as a symbol of Black economic development and had a role in helping to fulfil the broader goals of American citizenship. Hatcher reflected that although there were ‘honest differences of opinion between Black & Minority leaders’ on the ‘subject of Black Economic Development’, ‘full participation in the American system is virtually meaningless without a full and just share of the economic rewards which our system has historically bestowed upon those who work within its framework’.Footnote 98 Hatcher followed these lofty sentiments with a plea closer to home:
And that is why it is so important that a Minority Business Directory for Gary has been published. For without the information as to which business are Black & Minority-owned, the community cannot enjoy the opportunity to support those enterprises – and in turn, breathe life into the goal of Black & Minority Economic Development here in Gary.Footnote 99
The Gary directory symbolized the end of the era of the Negro main street as the racialized terrain of individual acts of entrepreneurship, an older generation of race men and women and organizationally based urban citizenship groups like Negro chambers of commerce came to end. Instead, Gary and other emerging majority-Black cities like it were now animated by the ‘business of Black Power’, where economic and communal uplift shifted to a new partnership between grassroots activists and local entrepreneurs who saw the possibilities of transforming newly won political power into economic opportunities; and those of new Black urban regimes (of mayors, bureaucrats and non-profits) which began to take shape by the early 1970s.Footnote 100 Other than occasional ‘buy Black’ campaigns which resulted in a publication (or now a website), the era of the Negro directory – and by extension, the Negro main street – was over.
Conclusion
In a May 2021 article, Time magazine raised awareness of ‘Black Wall Streets’, or what this article has called Negro main streets.Footnote 101 The article suggests that the lack of knowledge about these ‘centers of Black wealth and success’ is concerning, as not knowing ‘the circumstances that undermined Black businesses during these neighborhoods’ heydays is key to understanding the obstacles that face many BIPOC people today’.Footnote 102 The USA’s recent era of ‘racial reckoning’ opened up new conversations about the effect of urban renewal (and later gentrification) on Black urban communities, and has elicited a variety of proposals that focus on the revival of these Black business districts as a form of reparative planning and equitable development.Footnote 103 These proposals have been contested, with some (like Michelle Boyd) arguing that a focus on redeveloping Black business districts is an exercise in ‘Jim Crow nostalgia’ that privileges middle-class interests.Footnote 104 Others have argued that recognizing past patterns of exclusion as well as community place-making are necessary parts of a redevelopment process that will nurture these districts into places of community restoration, economic growth and cultural vibrancy.Footnote 105
This article examined the emergence and development of Black business directories during the long Jim Crow era. Through both text-space and the spatial syntax of a print medium, these directories inscribed Black Americans into new urban spaces. Collectively, these publications played a role in shaping and reflecting Black urban life from its pre-emancipation beginnings to the rise and fall of Jim Crow communities from the 1910s to the 1950s, culminating with the mass displacement of urban renewal of the late 1950s and 1960s. By using these directories as a collective data source, researchers can better understand how contentious debates between individuals and organizations over racial uplift strategies, respectability politics, Black self-determination, Black capitalism, racial integration and gender were translated into the text-space of urban communities. The findings from this research reveal that more attention should be paid to hitherto untapped sources of information about life in urban Black America during the rise and fall of the long Jim Crow era. This research can be used as a resource for both planners, community leaders and residents who seek to reinscribe Black American communities into the ledger of the twenty-first century metropolis.
Competing interests
The author declares none.
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