The National Negro Business League and the Fight for a Seat at the Table
Booker T. Washington's National Negro Business League was the closest thing the country had to a national voice for Black business, and it still would not give Madam Walker a turn to speak until she stopped asking for permission.
What happens when the country's leading Black business organization will not give a beauty entrepreneur a turn to speak? Booker T. Washington founded the National Negro Business League in Boston in 1900, built around his belief that Black America should build its own economic base from within. 1 Based out of Tuskegee, the League grew fast, from a founding meeting to 320 chapters by 1905 and more than 600 chapters across 34 states by 1915, drawing in Black businessmen and women along with farmers, doctors, lawyers, and craftsmen. 1 Its stated mission, in its own words, was "to promote the commercial and financial development of the Negro." 1
The woman who stood up anyway
Madam C.J. Walker had, by 1912, built a hair care company employing thousands of Black women, and she wanted a place on the program at that year's League convention in Chicago. Booker T. Washington declined her requests to speak, more than once. On the convention's final day, during a session with the National Bankers Association, Walker rose from the audience without an invitation. 2 "I am a woman who started in business seven years ago with only $1.50," she told the room, going on to describe the factory and property she had built since. 2
The League functioned less like a single command structure and more like a loose federation of local chapters, and its real success, in the assessment of historians who have studied it, was the annual meeting itself, where local businessmen and women scattered across the country could compare notes, offer each other support, and raise the morale of members. 1
The League found a home inside a beauty college
The exclusion Walker faced at the podium sits alongside a quieter fact, that the League also depended on beauty industry entrepreneurs for something as basic as meeting space. Annie Malone's Poro College in St. Louis housed the National Negro Business League's headquarters at one point, because Black organizations were routinely denied access to most public venues elsewhere in the city. 3 A National Trust for Historic Preservation account of the same campus lists Poro College as having housed both the Frederick Douglass Post Office and the National Negro Business League's headquarters within its walls. 4
Put those two facts side by side and the relationship between the League and the beauty trade looks more complicated than a simple story of exclusion. Booker T. Washington's organization was the closest thing to a national voice for Black business at the time, and it did real work convening entrepreneurs across the country. It also, at its highest profile event, initially refused a stage to one of the most successful businesswomen in the country, whose products, ironically, were advertised in exactly the kind of Black owned newspapers the League's own members ran. Walker never asked for permission again after 1912. She built her own convention instead, in 1917, and ran it herself. 2
What happened to the League after Washington
Washington died in 1915, and the League he had built around his own personal authority struggled to replace him. Robert R. Moton, Washington's successor at Tuskegee Institute, led the organization through the 1920s and into the 1940s, keeping its headquarters tied to Tuskegee the whole time. 1 That changed in 1944, when Roscoe Dunjee, editor of the Oklahoma City Black Dispatch, was elected president, ending Tuskegee's three decade hold on the League's leadership. 1 The organization also depended on funding from wealthy white donors, including Andrew Carnegie and Julius Rosenwald, a detail that complicates any simple story of the League as a purely self sufficient Black institution. 1 It continued in that form until 1966, when it was renamed the National Business League and reincorporated in Washington, D.C., where a version of it still operates today. 1
References
- "National Negro Business League." Encyclopedia of Alabama. encyclopediaofalabama.org
- "Business, Madam C.J. Walker." Speaking While Female Speech Bank. speakingwhilefemale.co/business-walker
- "Annie Malone and Madam C.J. Walker: Pioneers of the African American Beauty Industry." National Museum of African American History and Culture. nmaahc.si.edu
- "Hair Care Helped a Community: Black Entrepreneur Annie Malone and Poro College." National Trust for Historic Preservation. savingplaces.org
