Published in Apr 2018

How lynching was used by whites to destroy competition from black business owners

To the editor: Many sincere white Americans have raised the question of why African Americans have failed to become as successful as other people of color, especially recent immigrants to United States. The article on lynchings sheds some light on the subject.

The story of the murder of Elmore Bolling, a successful black businessman, by his jealous white neighbor in Alabama in 1949 was just a glimpse into a pattern of racist violence that terrorized African Americans for generations. On a broader scale, during the Jim Crow era white Americans destroyed prosperous black businesses in many communities.

One of the most notorious of such incidents took place in Memphis in 1892. There, a store called People's Grocery, which was owned by a successful black businessman, competed with a nearby white-owned shop. The People's Grocery owner and two of his black employees were lynched by white marauders in a horrific assault that reverberated throughout the nation and wiped out the entrepreneurial spirit of many African Americans in Memphis and elsewhere.

Read the original article on latimes.

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There is no Black business without Black politics. Understand that. If the government doesn’t ensure a fair playing field and protect our interests, it’s a hamster wheel. And it’s far worse now because these vicious, racist white mobs took us off the board, amassed massive wealth, then shut the gate and locked us out. This is why I’m so infuriated when people say we should just do Black business, as if we haven’t tried. It’s so ignorant and ahistorical.


By Legrand H. Clegg II