Business - History
The History of Black Management Reveals an Overlooked Form of Capitalism By Lila MacLellan On June 4, the reverend Al Sharpton appeared at the first public memorial for George Floyd and delivered a stirring eulogy, one that served as a bridge linking the personal grief of the slain man’s family with America’s history of racism and violence against Black people. He presented a long, devastating account of the ways Black Americans have been metaphorically pinned down—physically, spiritually, and economically—just as Floyd had been suffocated by the Minneapolis police officer who kneeled on his neck. “We were smarter than the underfunded schools you put us in, but you had your knee on our neck,” Sharpton said. “We could run corporations and not hustle in the streets,” he also said, “but you had your knee on our neck.” Leon Prieto and Simone Phipps, two management professors and the authors of African American Management History (Emerald Points, 2019 www.amazon.com/African-American-ManagementHistory-Cooperative/dp/178756662), were watching that afternoon from Atlanta. They found that last statement profound, they later told me, because it pithily encapsulated the reality of running African American businesses in the United States. It also spoke to what Prieto and Phipps see as their role in the Black Lives Matter movement: connecting the dots between the philosophies of historical Black business leaders—whose ideas, values, and traditions have been left out of the management canon—and America’s racial inequities today. The pair argue that the ideas supported by African American managers during the first few decades of the 20th century, a relative golden age for Black business, hold lessons that are relevant in this century.
Discovering the Hidden Figures of Black Management History
Charles Clinton Spaulding, circa 1912. Na onal Archives and Records Administra on/Crea ve Commons
historically Black college in Orangeburg, South Carolina. There they noticed an oddity that would hold true throughout their academic careers: In the textbooks they read, all of the management gurus that informed their views of organizational culture, financing, strategy, or the purpose of a company, were caucasian, says Phipps, now an associate professor of management at Middle Georgia State University’s School of Business. “[W]e learned a lot about African American history, but when we were reading the management textbooks, I was like, ‘Ok, there are a lot of things that can be here, but they’re not listed.’ I felt that there had to be African Americans who contributed to the field.”
Phipps and Prieto, who are married, are both The Father of Black Management History from Trinidad and Tobago. They first met as The first figure the duo studied extensively undergraduate students at Clafl in University, a was Charles Clinton Spaulding (https:// 24
July-August 2020
DAWN
www.africanbusinessassociation.org
