Impact of the <cite>Brown</cite> decision on black-owned businesses
Rivera describes in some detail the impact of the 1954 <cite>Brown</cite> decision on black-owned businesses. According to Rivera, the demise of de jure segregation also spelled the demise of many African American business endeavors. While he acknowledges that many black-owned insurance companies and banks survived, other businesses struggled and many of them folded in the years following <cite>Brown</cite>.
Citing this Excerpt
Oral History Interview with Alexander M. Rivera, February 1, 2002. Interview C-0298. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) in the Southern Oral History Program Collection, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Full Text of the Excerpt
Of course, '54 was the decision that changed,
as I say, changed everything. Black newspapers went out of business. A
lot of black schools closed. It was just what we had, we were working
for desegregation and when we got it, it meant the end of our jobs.
- KIERAN TAYLOR:
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I'd imagine a lot of black businesses -
- ALEXANDER M. RIVERA:
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Yeah, a lot of black businesses.
- KIERAN TAYLOR:
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Went out of business, insurance companies.
- ALEXANDER M. RIVERA:
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Well, not so much the insurance companies.
- KIERAN TAYLOR:
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They did all right or better.
- ALEXANDER M. RIVERA:
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No, they didn't do better. Before the Brown
versus Topeka Board, the banks and insurance companies,
businesses of that stature had already come to conclusion that black
business was good business. Now a lot of them had a differential, and
that is I was told, I didn't ever see
this. But I was told that the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company
charged more for premiums for blacks than they did for whites. They had
a separate system. But they did, they took them. Now as far as the banks
were concerned, when the banks were in this area found that the
Mechanics and Farmer's Bank was making money, then they
started accepting blacks over to black accounts, but it
wasn't until they started hiring blacks that the real
breakdown came. When they started hiring people in the front offices,
blacks. When they started training them for the higher positions and so
forth, then of course, they became. I'm sure that the
Mechanics and Farmers Bank has felt it. They're not as strong
now as they used to be. They had a building savings and loan
that's virtually out of business because see the one time the
early years when the early years of the bank when Roosevelt came in
office, he declared a bank holiday. I don't know if
you've ever heard of that. All banks were closed. In other
words, he was trying to let them come back those that were abler to come
back. The Mechanics and Farmers Bank, the black bank, was the first bank
in Durham to open after the bank holiday. So people looked around and
said, 'Are you telling me that that was, that's
the soundest bank in Durham?' I said, 'Yeah,
that's what it is.' They're open. It
was the first one. They got a lot of Jewish business from stores that
the Jews were running in the black community. They got a lot of that
business.
