“I thought I’d been given the shit detail,” recalled longtime activist turned scholar Komozi Woodard, of a time in the early seventies when the prominent Black power leader Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) assigned him to organize economic development efforts in their hometown of Newark, New Jersey. At the time, “the sexy assignments were politics like African Liberation and the Gary Convention,” said Woodard. “In college when people talked about Black power, we weren’t talking about ‘cooperative economics’! Economics was that ‘Black box’ that people mentioned but never looked inside.”

How do we interpret Woodard’s reaction to his assignment—his sense that economic development was a marginal front in the struggle for liberation? After all, Black power activists’ trenchant critique of interrelated political, cultural, and economic inequality remains one of the movement’s most salient contributions. So why wouldn’t economic development emerge as a crucial component of activists’ resistance? In fact, Woodard’s own perspective changed once he immersed himself in the business of Black power. “I realized that economic development was another aspect of grassroots organizing, creating alternatives to poverty,” he recalled. Yet his initial reluctance to embrace economic development was widely shared at the time, and his description of economics as an unexamined “Black box” extends to the historiography on the topic, a contradiction explored in this volume.

This collection explores the multifaceted and wide-ranging strains of economic development in the era of Black power. It examines several of the actual businesses born in this moment—some for the collective good of the people and others as exercises in self-interest and greed. But The Business of Black Power also dissects the renewed interest in Black economic development as an idea and the debates it generated. Black activists pressed business leaders, corporations, and government officials into supporting a range of ventures, from independent Black ownership to collective Black entrepreneurship, to grassroots attempts to rebuild inner-city markets in the wake of disinvestment. The business of Black power pioneered new strategies, sometimes in concert with corporate executives and public officials. Yet activists fiercely debated the role of business in strengthening liberation movements, and many rejected capitalism or collaboration with business outright. For those engaged in the business of Black power it was no more exclusively about profit making and profit seeking than it was about transforming politics and culture.