Urban Locations of Eminent Black Entrepreneurs in the United States

Abstract

Extraordinarily successful Black entrepreneurs have received relatively little attention in the literature on Black socioeconomic progress in the US. The present study fills this gap by identifying the urban centres that have been the main locations of Black entrepreneurs who have been classified by scholars as ‘eminent’. Biographical data from highly regarded encyclopaedic sources show that these entrepreneurs have concentrated in a small number of urban centres and have a skewed spatial distribution that resembles the famous ‘Pareto curve’. These data also indicate that, over most of the 20th century, Black communities in the urban South produced a disproportionate share of the Black Americans whose business successes have been nationally recognised. However, the data suggest that, by the end of the century, the largest metropolitan areas outside the South—Chicago, New York and Los Angeles—were becoming the primary locations of eminent Black entrepreneurs in the US.