Negro Business and Business Education: Their Present and Prospective Development PDF
Preview Negro Business and Business Education: Their Present and Prospective Development
NEGRO BUSINESS AND BUSINESS EDUCATION Their Present and Prospective Develcrprrumt PLENUM STUDIES IN WORK AND INDUSTRY Series Editors: Ivar Berg, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and Arne L. Kalleberg, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, North Carolina WORK AND INDUSTRY Structures, Markets, and Processes Arne L. Kalleberg and Ivar Berg Current Volumes in the Series: THE BUREAUCRATIC LABOR MARKET The Case of the Federal Civil Service Thomas A. DiPrete THE EMPLOYMENT RELATIONSHIP Causes and Consequences of Modem Personnel Administration William P. Bridges and Wayne J. Villemez ENRICHING BUSINESS ETHICS Edited by Clarence C. Walton LABOR AND POLITICS IN THE U.S. POSTAL SERVICE Vern K. Baxter LIFE AND DEATH AT WORK Industrial Accidents as a Case of Socially Produced Error Tom Dwyer NEGRO BUSINESS AND BUSINESS EDUCATION Their Present and Prospective Development Joseph A. Pierce Introduction by John Sibley Butler THE OPERATION OF INTERNAL LABOR MARKETS Staffing Practices and Vacancy Chains Lawrence T. Pinfield SEGMENTED LABOR, FRACTURED POLITICS Labor Politics in American Life William Form THE STATE AND THE LABOR MARKET Edited by Samuel Rosenberg WHEN STRIKES MAKE SENSE-AND WHY Lessons from Third Republic French Coal Miners Samuel Cohn A Continuation Order Plan is available for this series. A continuation order will bring delivery of each new volume immediately upon publication. Volumes are billed only upon actual shipment. For further information please contact the publisher. NEGRO BUSINESS AND BUSINESS EDUCATION Their Present and Prospective Development JOSEPH A PIERCE Laie ofA tlanta University Atlanta, Georgia Introduction by JOHN SIBLEY BUTLER University of Texas Austin, Texas Springer Science+B usiness Media, LLC Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data On file Pages v-xx ©1995 Springer Science+Business Media New York Originally published by Plenum Press, New York in 1995 AlI rights reserved ISBN 978-1-4899-1075-2 ISBN 978-1-4899-1073-8 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-4899-1073-8 ©1947 Harper & Brothers This book is published by arrangement with HarperCollins Publishers, New York AlI rights reserved This book was reprinted in 1971 by Negro Universities Press A Division of Greenwood Press, Inc., Westport, Connecticut No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the Publisher Introduction Joseph A. Pierce's Permanent Contribution to the Study of Business and Business Education There are some works that are timeless and have the ability to inform the future although they were written in the past. Joseph A. Pierce's Negro Business and Business Education certainly is a work which falls into that category. Although published over forty years ago, in 1947, the scholarship presented in its pages informs us of the problems associated with the development of business enterprise and business education. This work should be read by all interested in solving the problems associated with the rebuilding of American communities; it should also be read by those who are interested in augmenting the educational process with the entrepreneurial spirit. We should also point out that al though the work is concerned with the experience of people of African descent, it speaks to the overall problem of business edu cation and the re-creation of the importance of business educa tion and how it impacts communities. Pierce's work represents, for that time period, the culmination of scholarly works on Americans of African descent in business which commenced in the late 1800s. It also predicts many of the theoretical developments that have taken place in the more re cent area called the sociology of ethnic enterprise. The purpose of this introduction is to introduce to some, and simply present to others, Pierce's classic Negro Business and Busi ness Education. In doing so, it will address the overall career of Professor Pierce, the context in which the study of black enter prise developed, how the study relates to the more recent stud ies of ethnic enterprise today, and how this work can be used to inform policy on the rebuilding of many black communities today. v vi INTRODUCTION I Joseph Alphonso Pierce was born in Waycross, Georgia. His educational experiences took place in Atlanta, the Mecca for black education. After receiving a diploma from Atlanta Univer sity High School in 1921, he enrolled in Atlanta University and received an A.B. degree in the social sciences. In 1930 he com pleted an M.S. degree in mathematics at the University of Michi gan. In 1938 his Ph.D. was completed at Michigan, also in the field of mathematics. Pierce began his career as an instructor in the Department of Mathematics at Texas College in Tyler, Texas. Between 1927 and 1929, he returned to Atlanta and chaired the Department of Mathematics at Booker T. Washington High School. From 1930 to 1938, he was a professor of mathematics at Wiley College in Marshall, Texas. In 1938 he again returned to Atlanta to chair, and teach in, the Department of Mathematics at Atlanta Univer sity. It was in Atlanta, from 1944 to 1946, that he served as re search director of the project to study business and business education among African-Americans. In 1948 Pierce left Atlanta and went to Texas Southern Uni versity in Houston, where he began a distinctive career as a col lege administrator. After serving as head of the Department of Mathematics at Texas Southern, he became chairman of the Di vision of Natural and Physical Sciences. In 1966 he was named the third president of Texas Southern University. From 1967 to 1968 he served as a consultant to NASA. Now deceased, Pierce was very active in fraternal and com munity organizations. He was a member of the Sigma Xi and Delta Kappa Chi honorary societies. Professionally, he held mem berships in the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, the American Statistical Association, the National Institute of Science, and the National Educational Association. Pierce was of a generation that understood the relationship be tween business enterprise, education, and successful children. He was married to the former Juanita George and they had one son, Joseph A. Pierce, who is now a medical doctor in San Antonio, Texas. INTRODUCfiON vii II Negro Business and Business Education was born in an era when the development of business enterprise was seen as being abso lutely necessary for black communities in America. The builders of this historic study were quite aware of the history of business enterprise among African-Americans since their arrival in the country. More important, by the 1940s, the period in which this project developed, there existed an excellent literature on the study of blacks as businesspeople. From this literature grew the justification for connecting businesspeople with educational insti tutions. Since the turn of the century, scholars showed a systematic de sire to understand the relationship between business enterprise and economic stability. In 1907 Du Bois published a massive work entitled Economic Co-Operation Among Negroes, in which al most every facet of educational institutions, community organi zations, and enterprises was explored.1 Du Bois showed how blacks created a sense of community and a degree of economic security between the period of the end of slavery and the turn of the century. Within forty years they created hundreds of pri vate schools, burial societies that laid the foundation for insur ance companies, and concentrated on the relationship between business enterprise and the education of children.2 In 1919 the Tuskegee Research Institute, under the direction of Monroe N. Work, began the publication of The Negro lear Book. This yearbook systematically documented the progress of the black population in the establishment of business enterprises. In the first edition of The Negro lear Book, published in 1919, Work documented the legal barriers and disappointments that blacks faced in America and enumerated the establishment of business enterprises and other community organizations. He noted that in that year there were over 50,000 enterprises run by people of African descent in America; the annual volume of business was about $1.2 billon. Work then developed a table that showed "Fifty Years' Progress of Negro Business 1867-1917."3 Pierce and his staff also had excellent journal articles to ex amine as they developed the project on business enterprise. In 1929 ]. H. Harmon published an article entitled "The Negro as a Local Business Man," in which he tied the development of busi ness enterprise by people of African descent to the African ex perience.4 Harmon noted that business enterprise within the viii INTRODUCTION group is not exactly a recent development. While in Africa blacks were known as sharp traders, and the evil effects of slavery did not always eradicate this tendency in the natives that were trans ported to America. Harmon then weaves this general theme into a thesis that draws on the development of enterprise of people of African descent. The literature also boasted an article by Booker T. Wasington entitled "Durham, North Carolina: A City of Negro Enterprise."5 Published in 1911, this article was one of the first community level studies of people of Americans of African descent. Was ington noted that "I found here the largest Negro insurance company in the world, with assets amounting to $100,000, own ing its building, a large three-story structure, and being operated with nothing but Negro clerks and agents. Here is located the Durham Textile and the Whitted Wood Working Company, manufacturers of doors, window frames, metals and all kinds of building material. Here, too, is the Union Iron Works Company, a Negro Company that manufactures general foundry products, turning out plows, plow castings, laundry heaters, grates and cast ing for domestic purposes."6 Washington does an excellent job of enumerating major enterprises in Durham. Other important works that predated this book, and provided historical and theoretical guidance to Pierce, were Abram L. Harris's The Negro as Capitalist (1937), W. E. B. Du Bois's The Ne gro in Business (1899), Henry M. Minton's Early History of Negroes in Philadelphia (1913), M. S. Stuart's An Economic Detour: A History of Insurance in the Lives of American Negroes (1940), and Alban L. Holsey's 1938 influential short review article "Seventy-Five Years of Negro Business."7 What is important for us is that when Pierce and his staff planned the study Negro Business and Business Edu cation, the study of the business activities of people of African descent had been under way since before the turn of the twen tieth century. The original proposal to study people of African descent and business education was developed in order to enhance the busi nes activity of communities. It was done at a time when institu tions of higher learning were adding business school to a liberal arts curriculum. In a speech at a conference held in Atlanta in the early 1940s, Pierce opened the meeting with an address en titled "Problems and Needs of Business Education among Ne groes, Including Problems Related to Curricula, Vocational Guidance, Teaching Personnel, and Cooperation between Busi- INTRODUCTION ix ness Men and Teachers." The meeting was attended by repre sentatives of government, education, the National Negro Business League, and the National Negro Insurance Association. In this 1944 speech, Pierce brought together the history of enterprise among people of African descent-as had been documented in the literature-and the need for a study on the relationship between education and business enterprise: I am very happy to see that this Conference has been called in Atlanta, the nerve center of the South and the nerve center of Negro business and Negro higher education in the South. I am also very happy to participate in this Conference which, I hope, will have for its purpose a thorough study and survey, both now and in the future, of the growing field of Negro business. Thanks to the initiative of our pioneers in business and to the needs of the Negro community, our economic structure has developed so rapidly that a serious study should be made of this subject with the ultimate objective of giving direction to its trend . . . . Wilberforce in 1895 and Fisk in 1916 were the first two institutions to offer courses in business in order to meet the small but growing need on the Negro's part to acquire at least a rudimentary knowledge of economic and business principles. The early twenties was the era of Negro business boom when Negro businessmen talked about million-dollar corporations as if they were playthings and when all kinds of wildcat business enterprises including a Negro stock exchange were opened. Stimulated by the glowing pictures of an independent black economy painted by our businessmen, six more colleges opened two-year secretarial training courses to meet the need for secretarial and clerical work. Educators, however, soon realized that merely teaching students how to typewrite or how to take dictation would not be meeting the rapidly growing demand for young men and women capable of organizing and managing small-business enterprises of their own. As a result, the late twenties witnessed the institutions already having two-year secretarial training curricula enlarge them into four-year curricula, while others introduced either two-year or four-year curricula, or both. On the eve of the stock market crash of 1929, there were twelve colleges offering four-year courses leading to bachelors degrees [in business]. Today, there are twenty-eight colleges offering four-year courses, and twenty-two of these had opened business departments since 1926.8
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