Black businesses were essential to facilitating the Great Migration of African Americans out of the South between the 1910s and 1960s. Yet, the traditional narrative of the migration as a movement of laborers seeking high-wage jobs obscures the history of African Americans who moved north or west seeking entrepreneurial opportunities.
This story is featured in my book, “Freedom Enterprise: Black Entrepreneurship and Racial Capitalism in Detroit,” which will be published April 8, 2025.
Between 1910 and 1970, more than 6 million African Americans left the South for destinations such as Detroit, Chicago, New York and Los Angeles. This mass exodus had, and continues to have, enormous political, cultural and social implications for our nation. Migrants were seeking true freedom, including full political and economic citizenship – things they had not been able to achieve in the Jim Crow South.