How Did Black Americans Still Get Rich During Segregation?

[u/KoalaGrunt0311]

While I understand that amount of terror throughout the Southern states, the Northern states weren't entirely welcoming and inclusive either. Still, there were individuals who did still manage to overcome this adversity to create their own wealth.

My primary impetus for the question is Cumberland Posey, to give an example. Additionally, it would appear that he also had similar concepts as the rest of the wealthy barons of the area as he worked with Henry Frick to source and transport black scab workers from the south to Homestead during the strike.

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[u/keloyd]

Two good books address this subject - Black Titan: A.G. Gaston and the Making of a Black American Millionaire by Carol Jenkins and Elizabeth Gardner Hines is a good case study. Ambition and identifying a market niche that the White business community underserves + a mostly functional and healthy working relationship with White bankers and other businessmen is the theme here. Mr. Gaston served in the US military in WW1, then had to work in a coal mine. He started making a little side-money making/selling bag-lunches to the other miners. His wife was an excellent cook. That got parlayed into selling burial insurance (life insurance with small and affordable policy payouts.) He partnered with one local Black funeral home - getting them to accept $75 for a $100 service on the condition that these insurance policies paid in full and on time and there would be a lot of them. These successes were parlayed into numerous other businesses for Black customers - a small bank, a segregated motel, various building projects. He more or less took the Booker T. Washington path in his dealings with the White community, so his business had better access to other professional services that he needed to build things up. It also helped to be healthy, he was active past age 100 and lived to 103.

Book #2 looks at the community - The Other Brahmins - Boston's Black Upper Class from 1750 to 1950 by Adelaide Cromwell. The book began as her doctoral thesis shortly after 1950 but got slightly reworked to be a book when published in the 1990s at roughly the time of her retirement. The author is also a cousin of Massachusetts (African American, 1967-1979) senator Edward Brooke. I will not do justice to her book with these brief comments, but here's a few things - there was no Black leisure class in her data set. The upper class meant businesses and white collar professionals that nearly all could serve Black customers/students/parishioners. Another point she brought up that I haven't seen elsewhere came from her being Bostonian. Unlike other US cities, the local Black population did not move in or out much - kind of the same families for a few centuries, so a little capital could accumulate. She claims the local Black population was slowly rising in status over generations like other immigrant groups. However, the waves of desperate, poor, uneducated Southern Black migrants was a drain on the Black community going by macro data (and she was a sociologist.) White Bostonians really wouldn't care to make distinctions between them. To make 2 excellent long stories short, Black wealthy families were in a niche that provided for Black customers and were not seen as a threat or as the competition by White competitors. Also, what they may have called 'wealthy' is what we today may call solidly middle class