Urban black business districts will serve as Exhibit A in a new black history, an antidote to the view that between the demise of Reconstruction and the Harlem Renaissance there's little but lynching and Plessy v. Ferguson. During this very period, blacks were building thriving commercial districts of their own. Henry Louis Gates Jr. has remarked: "What really captivated me was that in the all-black world of Amos 'n' Andy . . . there was an all-black department store, owned and operated by black attendants for a black clientele." Ideally, more blacks would know that such worlds-within-a-world actually existed.
Chicago's "Bronzeville" is a handy example. As the city industrialized after 1875, blacks occupied a three-by-15-block enclave on the South Side, and the Great Migration from the South swelled the black population to 109,548 by 1920. Bronzeville, also known as "Black Metropolis," was home to several black newspapers, including the Bee, which occupied a magnificent Art Deco building, and the Defender, a publication of national influence, whose editorials urging blacks to migrate from the South were a major spur for the Great Migration itself. The literary-minded of Bronzeville also had such news magazines available to them as The Half-Century and The Light.
It was said that if you held up a horn at State and 35th, it would play itself because of the musical winds always blowing. Bronzeville was a leading center of innovation in jazz, nurturing Jelly Roll Morton, King Oliver, Louis Armstrong, and Earl "Fatha" Hines. Oscar Micheaux's film company, producing a pioneering oeuvre of "race movies," was based not in New York or Hollywood but Bronzeville.
For all the jazz and journalism, though, at the end of the day, the business of Bronzeville was business: there were 731 business establishments in 1917, in 61 different lines of work. Of several banks, the most prominent was the Binga State Bank founded in 1908, Jesse Binga having begun with a coal, oil, and gas wagon and parlayed this into realty investments. Many other Bronzeville blacks purchased real estate just as avidly, amassing holdings that totaled $100 million by 1929. Several magnificent buildings besides the one housing the Bee ornamented Bronzeville, including the Overton Hygienic—which contained a cosmetics firm, a life-insurance company, a major bank, and a drugstore—and the seven-floor Knights of Pythias building, put up by one of the district's innumerable lodges (the inspiration for the Mystic Knights of the Sea on Amos 'n' Andy, which took place in Chicago in its original incarnation). The district boasted seven insurance companies, 106 lawyers, and several hotels, including "The Finest Colored Hotel in the World," the Hotel Brookmont.