Jawanza Kunjufu examines how to keep black businesses and the more than $450 billion generated by them in the black community.

In Collective Courage, Jessica Gordon Nembhard chronicles African American cooperative business ownership and its place in the movements for Black civil rights and economic equality. Not since W. E. B. Du Bois’s 1907 Economic Co-operation Among Negro Americans has there been a full-length, nationwide study of African American cooperatives. Collective Courage extends that story into the twenty-first century. Many of the players are well known in the history of the African American experience: Du Bois, A. Philip Randolph and the Ladies' Auxiliary to the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, Nannie Helen Burroughs, Fannie Lou Hamer, Ella Jo Baker, George Schuyler and the Young Negroes’ Co-operative League, the Nation of Islam, and the Black Panther Party. Adding the cooperative movement to Black history results in a retelling of the African American experience, with an increased understanding of African American collective economic agency and grassroots economic organizing. To tell the story, Gordon Nembhard uses a variety of newspapers, period magazines, and journals; co-ops’ articles of incorporation, minutes from annual meetings, newsletters, budgets, and income statements; and scholarly books, memoirs, and biographies. These sources reveal the achievements and challenges of Black co-ops, collective economic action, and social entrepreneurship. Gordon Nembhard finds that African Americans, as well as other people of color and low-income people, have benefitted greatly from cooperative ownership and democratic economic participation throughout the nation’s history.

This pioneering book explores the meaning of the term “Black social economy,” a self-help sector that remains autonomous from the state and business sectors. With the Western Hemisphere’s ignoble history of enslavement and violence towards African peoples, and the strong anti-black racism that still pervades society, the African diaspora in the Americas has turned to alternative practices of socio-economic organization. Conscientious and collective organizing is thus a means of creating meaningful livelihoods. In this volume, fourteen scholars explore the concept of the “Black social economy,” bringing together innovative research on the lived experience of Afro-descendants in business and society in Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Colombia, Guyana, Haiti, Jamaica, and the United States. The case studies in this book feature horrific legacies of enslavement, colonization, and racism, and they recount the myriad ways that persons of African heritage have built humane alternatives to the dominant market economy that excludes them. Together, they shed necessary light on the ways in which the Black race has been overlooked in the social economy literature.

"A Black History Reader, Dr. Claud Anderson’s fifth book, was written to highlight and examine the ignored Social Construct on Race, its effects on Black Americans and strategies they can use to take advantage of its weakness. Using a Q&A format, Dr. Anderson focuses on the etiology of White racism imbedded within the Social Construct."--Publisher's website.

The first book to bring together the key writings and speeches of civil rights activist Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander--the first Black American economist In 1921, Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander became the first Black American to gain a Ph.D. degree in economics. Unable to find employment as an economist because of discrimination, Alexander became a lawyer so that she could press for equal rights for African Americans. Although her historical significance has been relatively ignored, Alexander was a pioneering civil rights activist who used both the law and economic analysis to challenge racial inequities and deprivations. This volume--a recovery of Sadie Alexander's economic thought--provides a comprehensive account of her thought-provoking speeches and writings on the relationship between democracy, race, and justice. Nina Banks's introductions bring fresh insight into the events and ideologies that underpinned Alexander's outlook and activism. A brilliant intellectual, Alexander called for bold, redistributive policies that would ensure racial justice for Black Americans while also providing a foundation to safeguard democracy.

The process of technological change takes a wide variety of forms. Propositions that may be accurate when referring to the pharmaceutical industry may be totally inappropriate when applied to the aircraft industry or to computers or forest products. The central theme of Nathan Rosenberg's new book is the idea that technological changes are often 'path dependent', in the sense that their form and direction tend to be influenced strongly by the particular sequence of earlier events out of which a new technology has emerged. The book advances the understanding of technological change by explictly recognising its essential diversity and path-dependent nature. Individual chapters explore the particular features of new technologies in different historical and sectoral contexts. This book presents a unique account of how technological change is generated and the processes by which improved technologies are introduced.

“Read this book. It explains so much about the moment...Beautiful, heartbreaking work.” —Ta-Nehisi Coates “A deep accounting of how America got to a point where a median white family has 13 times more wealth than the median black family.” —The Atlantic “Extraordinary...Baradaran focuses on a part of the American story that’s often ignored: the way African Americans were locked out of the financial engines that create wealth in America.” —Ezra Klein When the Emancipation Proclamation was signed in 1863, the black community owned less than 1 percent of the total wealth in America. More than 150 years later, that number has barely budged. The Color of Money seeks to explain the stubborn persistence of this racial wealth gap by focusing on the generators of wealth in the black community: black banks. With the civil rights movement in full swing, President Nixon promoted “black capitalism,” a plan to support black banks and minority-owned businesses. But the catch-22 of black banking is that the very institutions needed to help communities escape the deep poverty caused by discrimination and segregation inevitably became victims of that same poverty. In this timely and eye-opening account, Baradaran challenges the long-standing belief that black communities could ever really hope to accumulate wealth in a segregated economy. “Black capitalism has not improved the economic lives of black people, and Baradaran deftly explains the reasons why.” —Los Angeles Review of Books “A must read for anyone interested in closing America’s racial wealth gap.” —Black Perspectives