Entrepreneurs
on the Timeline

1797 Stephen Smith is born into slavery in Cecil County, Maryland. He will eventually partner with his cousin William Whipper and ...
1801 Elizabeth “Madame Betsy” Allergue of Virginia, opens and operates a store in Petersburg. ...
1817 François Lacroix, the wealthiest African American man in New Orleans before the Civil War, imports Parisian cloths and clothing to ...
1818 In Philadelphia, the cabinet-maker Eugene Baptiste, with the help of his wife and her family, establishes a catering business, employing ...
1819 In Charleston, South Carolina, seven women are among the city's nine leading African American grocers, fruit dealers, and confectioners. ...
1837 In Cincinnati, a group of African Americans found a cooperative steamboat company to take advantage of the lucrative trade on ...
1837 In New Bedford, Massachusetts, a group of African Americans establish a shipping company. ...
1855 The National Negro Convention issues a report on the value of urban African American businesses for various regions. In the ...
1859 In Philadelphia, there are 166 registered black shopkeepers. ...
1860 The African American rice planter Margaret Mitchell Harris, from South Carolina, sells her slaves at auction for over $25,000 and ...
1860 The successful businessman Barney Ford opens the Inter-Ocean Hotel in Denver, after settling there upon escaping from slavery. ...
1900 Alberta Moore-Smith founds the first women's and first black women's incorporated business club in the country in Chicago, Illinois. She ...
1918 In Chicago, Evelyn Berry and Victoria Ross establish the Berry and Ross Doll Manufacturing Company, which makes “Berry's Famous Brown ...
1937 In Chicago, Minnie Lee Fellings founds the Minnie Lee Pie Company; by 1939 the company is selling 3,000 pies a ...
1991 Kathryn Leary founds Leary Group, Inc., which develops markets for African American products in Japan. ...
1993 In Milwaukee, Valerie Daniels-Carter, the owner of V&J Foods, Inc., acquires seventeen Burger King franchises, bringing the total number of ...
2005 The co-founder of BET Sheila Johnson is the first African American woman to own a stake in three professional sports ...

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Entrepreneurs

2 articles on Entrepreneurs

  • Entrepreneurs

    Source: Encyclopedia of African American History, 1619-1895: From the Colonial Period to the Age of Frederick Douglass

    [This entry contains two subentries dealing with African American entrepreneurs and their businesses from the Colonial period through 1895. The first article discusses the first African American entrepreneurs through 1830 and their long-term impact, while the second article discusses the successes, failures, and obstacles of African American entrepreneurs, including Frederick Douglass, after the Civil War.]

    The term entrepreneuris defined as a person who organizes and promotes but, more precisely, as someone who manages and assumes the risk of a business. Black businessmen, shopkeepers, ship's captains, and financiers thus served as leaders of the African American entrepreneurial class in early America. Black entrepreneurs existed in African American communities throughout the colonial, Revolutionary, and early national periods. Perhaps the leading black entrepreneur ...
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  • Entrepreneurs

    Source: Black Women in America, Second Edition

    African American women have a long tradition of participation in business, including entrepreneurial activities. In colonial America, their initial economic activities, primarily gender-based household manufacturing, farming, trade, and marketing ventures, were derived from activities that had been important to women in precolonial Africa. By capitalizing on culturally familiar agriculture techniques, African women were able to enter the colonial American economy as truck farmers and market women. By the nineteenth century, food trading by African women was so substantial that, as one diarist noted in Louisiana, “The market places are filled with Negro women selling fruits and vegetables.…They have control of the markets in New Orleans [and] bring their products to the market very neatly.” ...
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