Last updated Executive Committee of the National Negro Business League, c. 1910. NNBL founder Booker T. Washington (1856-1915) is seated, second from the left
The National Negro Business League (NNBL) was an American organization founded in Boston in 1900 by Booker T. Washington to promote the interests of African-American businesses.[1][2][3] The mission and main goal of the National Negro Business League was "to promote the commercial and financial development of the Negro." It was recognized as "composed of negro men and women who have achieved success along business lines".[4] It grew rapidly with 320 chapters in 1905 and more than 600 chapters in 34 states in 1915.
In 1966, the League was renamed and reincorporated in Washington D.C. as the National Business League, which remains in operation.
History
Establishment
The National Negro Business League (NNBL) was established in Boston, Massachusetts in 1900 by Booker T. Washington. The effort was supported by industrialist and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie.[citation needed] The organization was formally incorporated in 1901 in New York , and established 320 chapters across the United States.
The League included Negro small- business owners, doctors, farmers, other professionals, and craftsmen. Its goal was to allow business to put economic development at the forefront of getting African-American equality in the United States. Business was the main concern, but civil rights came next.
In 1905 the Nashville, Tennessee, chapter protested segregation in local transit with a boycott. Booker T. Washington felt that there was a need for African Americans to build an economic network and allow that to be a catalyst for change and social improvement. Also, extant press releases indicate that "the League organized the National Negro Business Service to 'help . . the Negro business men of the country solve their merchandising and advertising problems,' promoted advertising in Negro newspapers and magazines, and 'influenced . . . national advertisers to use Negro publications in reaching this importantly valuable group of people with its tremendous purchasing power.'"[5]
In 1907 the group's Executive Committee included J. B. Bell of Houston, Texas; 2. S. E. Courtney, M.D. of Boston, Massachusetts; W. L. Taylor of Richmond, Virginia; T. Thomas Fortune of New York City, Chairman; N. T. Velar of Brinton, Pennsylvania; J. C. Jackson of Lexington, Kentucky; M. M. Lewey of Pensacola, Florida; E. P. Booze of Colorado Springs, Colorado; S. A. Furniss M.D. of Indianapolis, Indiana; John E. Bush of Little Rock, Arkansas; and James C. Napier of Nashville, Tennessee.[8]
In May 1913, a respected Black journalist, Ralph Waldo Tyler was elected as the first National Organizer of the NNBL. Tyler's role was to travel throughout the Southern United States and document the state of negro businesses and encourage enrollment in the NNBL.[9]
After the death of Booker T. Washington in 1915, the League was headed by his successor at Tuskegee, Robert Russa Moton. Albon L. Holsey, an executive at Tuskegee, was executive secretary of the League. Other leaders in 1922-23 were John L. Webb, treasurer (succeeding Charles H. Anderson), and Charles Clinton Spaulding, head of the North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Co. in Durham, North Carolina.[10]
↑ Verney, Kevern J. (2001). The Art of the Possible: Booker T. Washington and Black Leadership in the United States, 1881-1925. Routledge. ISBN9780203055946.
↑ On Lynching and Other Crime, The North Wilkesboro Hustler (North Wilkesboro, North Carolina) September 7, 1906, page 1, accessed October 12, 2016 at https://www.newspapers.com/clip/6995846//
Further reading
Burrows, John H. The Necessity of Myth: A History of the National Negro Business League, 1900–1945 (Auburn, AL: Hickory Hill Press, 1988).
Harlan, Louis R. "Booker T. Washington and the National Negro Business League" in Raymond W. Smock, ed. Booker T. Washington in Perspective: Essays of Louis R. Harlan (1988) pp.98–109. online
Booker Taliaferro Washington was an American educator, author, and orator. Between 1890 and 1915, Washington was the primary leader in the African-American community and of the contemporary Black elite.
Tuskegee University is a private, historically black land-grant university in Tuskegee, Alabama. It was founded on Independence Day in 1881 by the Alabama Legislature.
The Niagara Movement (NM) was a civil rights organization founded in 1905 by a group of activists—many of whom were among the vanguard of African-American lawyers in the United States—led by W. E. B. Du Bois and William Monroe Trotter. The Niagara Movement was organized to oppose racial segregation and disenfranchisement. Its members felt "unmanly" the policy of accommodation and conciliation, without voting rights, promoted by Booker T. Washington. It was named for the "mighty current" of change the group wanted to effect and took Niagara Falls as its symbol. The group did not meet in Niagara Falls, New York, but planned its first conference for nearby Buffalo. The Niagara Movement was the immediate predecessor of the NAACP.
Up from Slavery is the 1901 autobiography of the American educator Booker T. Washington (1856–1915). The book describes his experience of working to rise up from being enslaved as a child during the Civil War, the obstacles he overcame to get an education at the new Hampton Institute, and his work establishing vocational schools like the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama to help Black people and other persecuted people of color learn useful, marketable skills and work to pull themselves, as a race, up by the bootstraps. He reflects on the generosity of teachers and philanthropists who helped educate Black and Native Americans. He describes his efforts to instill manners, breeding, health and dignity into students. His educational philosophy stresses combining academic subjects with learning a trade. Washington explained that the integration of practical subjects is partly designed to "reassure the White community of the usefulness of educating Black people".
The civil rights movement (1896–1954) was a long, primarily nonviolent action to bring full civil rights and equality under the law to all Americans. The era has had a lasting impact on American society – in its tactics, the increased social and legal acceptance of civil rights, and in its exposure of the prevalence and cost of racism.
Richard Henry Boyd was an African-American minister and businessman who was the founder and head of the National Baptist Publishing Board and a founder of the National Baptist Convention of America, Inc.
The civil rights movement (1865–1896) aimed to eliminate racial discrimination against African Americans, improve their educational and employment opportunities, and establish their electoral power, just after the abolition of slavery in the United States. The period from 1865 to 1895 saw a tremendous change in the fortunes of the Black community following the elimination of slavery in the South.
William Madison McDonald, nicknamed "Gooseneck Bill", was an American politician, businessman, and banker of great influence in Texas during the late nineteenth century. Part of the Black and Tan faction, by 1892 he was elected to the Republican Party of Texas's state executive committee, as temporary chairman in 1896, and as permanent state chairman in 1898.
The Future of the American Negro, a book written in 1899 by American educator Booker T. Washington, set forth his ideas regarding the history of enslaved and freed African-American people and their need for education to advance themselves. It was re-published as a second edition in 1900 and was made available in electronic form in 2008 via Project Gutenberg.
Ralph Waldo Tyler (1860–1921) was an African-American journalist, war correspondent, and government official. He was the only accredited black foreign correspondent specifically reporting on African-American servicemen stationed in France during World War I. His career began in his hometown of Columbus, Ohio, in the late 1880s, where he held several journalistic positions including editor of the Afro-American; co-founding the short-lived African-American newspaper, The Free American; contributing a Black news column and serving as society editor at the white-owned Columbus Evening Dispatch, and writing for The Ohio State Journal.
William Clarence Matthews was an early 20th-century African-American pioneer in athletics, politics and law. Born in Selma, Alabama, Matthews was enrolled at the Tuskegee Institute and, with the help of Booker T. Washington, enrolled at the Phillips Academy in 1900 and Harvard University in 1901. At Harvard, he became one of the standout baseball players, leading the team in batting average for the 1903, 1904, and 1905 seasons.
On October 16, 1901, shortly after moving into the White House, President Theodore Roosevelt invited his adviser, the African American spokesman Booker T. Washington, to dine with him and his family. The event provoked an outpouring of condemnation from white politicians and press in the American South. This reaction affected subsequent White House practice and no other African American was invited to dinner for almost thirty years.
Emmett Jay Scott was an American journalist, founding newspaper editor, government official and envoy, educator, and author. He was Booker T. Washington's closest adviser at the Tuskegee Institute. He was responsible for maintaining Washington's nationwide "machine," with its close links to the black business leadership, white philanthropists, and Republican politicians from the local level to the White House. After Washington's death, Scott lost his Tuskegee connection, but moved to Washington, D.C. as Special Adviser of Black Affairs to Secretary of War Newton D. Baker. Scott was the highest-ranking African-American in President Woodrow Wilson's administration. After 1919, he was less and less visible in national affairs, with the NAACP taking the leadership role that Booker T. Washington had dominated.
Robert Fulton Boyd was an African-American medical doctor, professor, politician, and one of the co-founders of the National Medical Association, serving as its first president between 1895-1898. He also researched the effects of racial segregation in healthcare.
In the US, Black-owned businesses, also known as African American businesses, originated in the days of slavery before 1865. Emancipation and civil rights permitted businessmen to operate inside the American legal structure starting in the Reconstruction Era (1863–77) and afterwards. By the 1890s, thousands of small business operations had opened in urban areas. The most rapid growth came in the early 20th century, as the increasingly rigid Jim Crow system of segregation moved urban Blacks into a community large enough to support a business establishment. The National Negro Business League—which Booker T. Washington, college president, promoted—opened over 600 chapters. It reached every city with a significant Black population.
James Carroll Napier was an American businessman, lawyer, politician, and civil rights leader from Nashville, Tennessee, who served as Register of the Treasury from 1911 to 1913. He is one of only five African Americans with their signatures on American currency. He was one of four African-American politicians appointed to a government positions under President William Howard Taft, sometimes referred to as Taft's "Black Cabinet." He was instrumental in founding civic institutions in Nashville to benefit the African-American business community and residents including educational opportunities.
William R. Pettiford was a minister and banker in Birmingham, Alabama. Early in his career he worked as a minister and teacher in various towns in Alabama, moving to the 16th Street Baptist Church in 1883 and serving there for about ten years. In 1890 he founded the Alabama Penny Savings Bank. It played an important role in black economic development in Alabama and in the South during the 25 years it existed. Pettiford has been called the most significant institutional builder and leader in the African American community in Birmingham during the period in which he lived. In 1897 he was said to be next to Booker T. Washington the black man who has done the most in the South for blacks.
Bess Bolden Walcott (1886-1988) was an American educator, librarian, museum curator and activist who helped establish the historical significance of the Tuskegee University. Recruited by Booker T. Washington to help him coordinate his library and teach science, she remained at the institute until 1962, but continued her service into the 1970s. Throughout her fifty-four year career at Tuskegee, she organized Washington's library, taught science and English at the institute, served as founder and editor of two of the major campus publications, directed public relations, established the Red Cross chapter, curated the George Washington Carver collection and museum and assisted in Tuskegee being placed on the National Register of Historic Places.
Solvent Savings Bank and Trust was an African American-owned bank in Memphis, Tennessee, founded in 1906 by Robert Reed Church. It was the first African American-owned bank to achieve $1 million in assets. It merged with Fraternal Savings Bank and Trust in 1927, which failed in 1929.
James Nathan Calloway was an American agriculturalist. Born in slavery in Tennessee, Calloway graduated from Fisk University before joining the faculty of the Tuskegee Institute. Initially a lecturer in mathematics, he became involved in agricultural science and was appointed manager of the institute's largest farm in 1897. He was selected to lead an expedition to German Togoland in 1900 to promote the production of cotton there. Calloway bred a special strain of the plant suited to local conditions but returned to the United States a year later. The experimental station that he founded remained in use until 1919 and established cotton as a staple crop of the colony. He returned to Tuskegee as farm manager and taught agriculture there until at least 1930.
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