Carole Merritt, African American Community Building in Atlanta:A Guide to the Study of Race in America

Atlanta as a fast-growing commercial center offered opportunities for Blacks as well as Whites to make good money. Having been founded less than twenty-five years before the Civil War, the relatively young city's business elite was newly arrived and untied to the planter society of the Old South. Atlanta's economy was supported by the railroad network that distributed cotton throughout the region and generated the growth of banks and brokerages, mills and factories. In addition, Atlanta was a lucrative market for Blacks in the building trades and personal services: barbering, tailoring, dressmaking, blacksmithing, masonry, carpentry, plastering, and painting. These were the traditional services that an elite corps of slaves had generally performed. After emancipation, they were the occupations that made for Black entrepreneurial success, but that were considered at the time too menial for Whites in the South. While such opportunities could not be considered areas of autonomy, they were, nevertheless, windows of business opportunity. In time as Jim Crow intensified, these windows would shut, but other windows of business opportunity would open. Ironically, Black business in Atlanta thrived on the crest of segregation. Whether in personal services that were a carry-over from slavery, or in life insurance in service to a Black market, Black business has profited from the racial order structured by Jim Crow. As Blacks lost their dominance in barbering to Whites by the early part of the twentieth century, Alonzo Herndon invested in life insurance for a Black community that had grown phenomenally by the turn of the twentieth century and could afford to support the mix of life insurance, banking and real estate that made Atlanta for Blacks and Whites a commercial and financial center.

Atlanta's Black business development was not unique. The story of Black barbering and life insurance is reflected in the career of John Merrick of Durham, North Carolina. Atlanta and Durham are both New South cities lying within the urban industrial belt of the Piedmont plateau. Both cities have Black institutions of higher learning that generated an elite leadership and the skilled managers for financial services. This suggests that research of the South's sub-regions is a promising framework for the study of African American community development.