"We Must Be on Our Own"

By Cadillac, Pullman and Jim Crow coach last week, 134 Negro businessmen journeyed from 27 states to the campus of Alabama's Tuskegee Institute. They were delegates to the 50th annual convention of the National Negro Business League, founded by Booker T. Washington in 1900 to advance the cause of Negroes in business. While the businessmen naturally discussed the future, they also debated how well they had done in the past 50 years.

"We have made ourselves felt in politics," said one delegate, "and we have gone a long way in music. But in business we have only touched the surface." In most cases, Negro businessmen (an estimated 800,000 in the U.S.) are still small businessmen--grocers, dry cleaners, restaurateurs. Nevertheless, their number has grown to the point where the league thought the time had come to change its policy. Once its main job had been to give Negroes confidence to go into business for themselves. Now the league thought that it should concentrate on telling them how to improve their business and broaden their markets.

Word of Caution. The delegate who has broadened his market the most was Dr. Charles Clinton Spaulding, 76, a longtime friend of Booker T. Washington. Born of ex-slaves, Spaulding had risen from a $10-a-month waiter's job to head the $28 million Negro-staffed North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Co. Said he: "We are making progress as businessmen. Three years ago very few Negroes could borrow money, even on Federal Housing Administration security. But now their reputation in that way has been changed. Our company and two others had a lot to do with [that]. We have loaned more than $1.5 million to Negroes in Philadelphia . . . and have not had a loss."

Spaulding, like the other delegates, did not want Negro businessmen to aim only at the Negro market; they should aim at a broader market, and compete, not on a racial basis, but as businessmen. Spaulding himself had proved that that could be done, when he opened a bank 41 years ago in the white business section of Durham, N.C. "Some people," he recalled, "said to me: 'You had better get out of there; they won't let you stay there . . .' We have been there ever since, and our relations with the white businessmen have been fine. About 10% of our depositors are white . . . My advice to Negroes is to stay in the same type of business they are now in, like insurance, merchandising and farming--and train your children to be better in that same type of business . . . What we want... is not Negro businesses but businesses [run] by Negroes."

Fringe Members. The way to get such businesses, said League President Horace Sudduth, who reputedly has made a $500,000 fortune in real estate, "is not to sit idly by ... and expect social organizations and the federal and state governments to do the job for us." Added another delegate: "The day of philanthropy is behind us. We must be on our own . . . Our program should [present] a well-defined means of entering into the full economy of the U.S., instead of [its] fringe."

To help do so, the league plans to establish a national office in Washington, provide members with guidance on expansion, and more efficient business methods. In effect, the league will try to do much the same job as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce does for its members.

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