Black Entrepreneurship, by Marcus Witcher and Rachel Ferguson ( (LSE Hayek Programme) [Video]

Black Entrepreneurship: Building the Foundation for Freedom

In the talk, the speakers discuss the efforts of black businessmen and women, entrepreneurs, mutual aid societies, and voluntary organizations in creating networks of black Americans that contributed to the success of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s and 1960s.

They argue that without entrepreneurship and civil society it is unlikely that the CRM would have been successful. They discuss the efforts of Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. DuBois, Madam C.J. Walker, The National Negroe Business League, the NAACP, the Black Elks, John Johnson, TRM Howard, and others in this talk. The contents are largely taken from chapter six of the co-authored book: Black Liberation Through the Marketplace: Hope, Heartbreak, and the Promise of America.

Marcus M Witcher is an Assistant Professor of History at Huntingdon College in Montgomery, Alabama. His first book Getting Right with Reagan: The Struggle for True Conservatism, 1980-2016 was published by the University Press of Kansas in 2019. Dr Witcher is also the co-editor of six edited collections and has been published in a diverse range of publications including: Reason Magazine, National Review, Modern Age, and the Washington Post. His most recent book, Black Liberation Through the Marketplace: Hope, Heartbreak, and the Promise of America was co-authored with Rachel Ferguson and was published by Emancipation Books in May of 2022.

Rachel Ferguson is the Director of the Free Enterprise Center at Concordia University Chicago where she is also the Assistant Dean of the College of Business, and a Professor of Business Ethics. She is an affiliate scholar of the Acton Institute and co-author of Black Liberation Through the Marketplace: Hope, Heartbreak, and the Promise of America. Her commentary has been featured at the Christian Post, the Acton Power Blog, Discourse Magazine, Law and Liberty, EconLib, and the Online Library of Liberty.