Immigrant Retail Entrepreneurship and Urban Black Population Size in the Late Nineteenth-Century United States

ABSTRACT

Building on the idea that immigrant merchants often operate in black consumer markets, this study tests the hypothesis that late nineteenth-century European immigrants’ highest odds of retail enterprise in the United States were in cities with the largest black populations. Regression analyses of census data show that the positive association between the odds of retail enterprise and percent black was strongest for men from European immigrant groups and especially strong for men of Polish and Russian ancestry, many of whom were Jewish immigrants. The analyses reveal that the association between the odds of retail enterprise and percent black was not significant for native white or black men. The findings accord with the proposition, derived from theories of middleman minorities and ethnic queuing, that immigrant retail entrepreneurship is most strongly associated with black population size for recently arrived immigrant groups that are often socially or spatially close to urban black communities.

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Robert L. Boyd

Robert L. Boyd is Professor of Sociology at Mississippi State University. While his research examines ethnic entrepreneurship and the migrations of blacks and immigrant ethnic groups to cities in the early twentieth-century United States, his recent studies have also explored such topics as the influence of residential segregation by race on the development of black-owned businesses, the emergence of urban subcultures in northern black communities during the Great Migration, and historical changes in the characteristics of eminent black entrepreneurs. His recent publications appear in Urban Studies, Urban Geography, the Journal of Sociology and Social Welfare, and Regional Studies.