Abstract
Postbellum United States offered both opportunities and challenges for black Americans. As the nation continued its steady progression through the Industrial Revolution, African Americans had to seek ways to accumulate wealth for themselves rather than others, and the playing field was nothing close to level. While writing about this subject faces its own limitations due to a lack of personal documentation from a society which existed at the bottom of the American social structure, there is still abundant data to be garnered. The topic remains important because it illuminates the past while shining a light on the disparities that remain in the present
Stating that the postbellum years which followed the United States Civil War as a time of incredible social, economic, and cultural change is a statement of the obvious. Painfully so for the nation’s newly freed blacks and newly minted American citizens constitutionally. Emancipation, a thing to be greatly desired by enslaved individuals and families, meant an opportunity to seek ways to accumulate wealth for themselves rather than others. The model of modern economic progress was born in the eighteenth century with the advent of the industrial revolution, with progress expanding considerably in the nineteenth century than the eighteenth stoked primarily by entrepreneurship.[1] African American communities were not monolithic (a message that remains true today) so it is important to think less nationally, even regionally, but at the local level. My topic for the final paper will be an examination the development of black radio stations and how they reflected the broader African American struggle for “racial equality, political empowerment, economic prosperity, and cultural self-determination.”[2] In addition to serving as “mirrors,” black owned and operated radio stations stood in the gap at critical junctions in American history while promoting the cultural and economic well-being for many, with implications at the national and local level. The expansion of black entrepreneurship in the nineteenth century will have an impact on the technological advances in the twentieth century.
Postbellum blacks faced unprecedented obstacles in their quest to acquire land, occupations, and entry into the free market. One of the great challenges of studying and writing about this subject rests in the fact that they existed at the bottom of the American social structure. Consequently, data must be carefully collected through a variety of means, especially through government documents such as federal census records. Newspapers also captured trends in the economy, often separated like so many other things, by race. Because economics appears to be easier to manage at the local level, use of samples for comparison seems a useful strategy.
Even ethnicity was fraught with nuance. The gulf that existed between black in white just prior to the war were staggering and according to qualitative research conducted by Bodenhorn on the economics of the well-being of African Americans in the nineteenth century, the numbers bear out a system of caste that developed based not only on race but also complexion. Bodenhorn shows just how complex this new society was using a variety of statistical data, sampling, and regressions that revealed differences in wealth between “black” and “mixed-race” households within both urban and rural settings that will be worthy of additional study. These will be juxtaposed with the strength of white households.
There are a few deductions to make, among them was the importance of the statistical results that indicated African Americans did acquire property and that acquisition was sometimes influenced by skin tone. Perhaps the most important conclusion to draw is this: the various reports and qualitative narratives show a people who held respect for property and a respect for the right to acquire wealth. Canaday and Reback (2010) probably expressed it best: accumulation of wealth among African Americans and the trials they faced during the postbellum era are important, not simply for understanding this history of oppression in the not-so-distant past, but for why racial disparities in wealth and other standards of living have persisted in the present.
Source List
Bodenhorn, Howard. The Color Factor: The Economics of African American Well-being in the Nineteenth-Century South. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2015. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199383092.001.0001.
Burton, Orville Vernon. “African American Status and Identity in a Postbellum Community: An Analysis of the Manuscript Census Returns.” Agricultural History 72, no. 2 (Spring, 1998): 213-240. https://search-proquest-com.ezproxy.liberty.edu/docview/ 1296020743/fulltext/266F38660A9E41A0PQ/1?accountid=12085&imgSeq=1
Canaday, Neil and Charles Reback. “Race, Literacy, and Real Estate Transactions in the Postbellum South.” The Journal of Economic History 70, no. 2 (2010): 428-445.
Holcombe, Randall G. “Progress and Entrepreneurship.” Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics 6, no. 3 (2003): 3-26.
[1] Randall G. Holcombe, “Progress and Entrepreneurship.” Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics 6, no. 3 (2003), 4.
[2] William Barlow, 1999, Voice Over: The Making of Black Radio. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 10.
Todd Elliott, Writer 