"Barred from most institutions, he patronizes colored theaters, restaurants, banks, insurance companies and stores. Negro-owned enterprises of this kind have existed since the Civil War. Compared with white, however, Negro-owned businesses are generally so inefficient and so meager in capital that they handle only a small part of the two billion dollars colored people spend every year."
This article is composed of paragraphs from a far longer article that tells the history of African-Americans between the years 1619 through 1939; click here to read it.
A book review by Langston Hughes presents an interesting view of how the African-American community fared just ten years earlier; you can read that here...
A 1938 article about the hardships of the Southern States during the Great Depression can be read here...
Click here to learn about the origins of the term "Jim Crow".
