rs were providing. The newly racialized environment now regulated African-American businesses to serving only African-Americans. A practical example of this assertion is found in an examination of the occupation of undertaking. Undertaking was perhaps the most exclusive protected market available to African-American entrepreneurs in the early twentieth century.3 Due to the changing climate in race relations in Northern cities there were no longer white undertakers who would even touch black bodies. There were also cultural specificities that African-American entrepreneurs engaged in the funeral process had to respect. As a result, African-Americans became over represented in the field of undertaking (Table 1.1) in the years following the Great Migration. Again, it is important to recognize that most opportunities for African-American entrepreneurs were similar to this one in that they were market specific service economy oriented. In short, changes in the ethnic compositions of (N)orthern cities in the early twentieth century made it difficult for African Americans to establish an economic interface in entrepreneurial occupations during the crucial period of their initial migration to these cities. The lack of such an interface may have set African Americans on a course of economic disadvantage for the rest of the twentieth century.4 An important piece in shaping this model of economic disadvantage is the pervasiveness of white supremacist theory in the dominant society of the time.5 The common belief of the inherent inferiority of blacks limited their entrance into the entrepreneurial economy, even in the North. One economist when speaking of the disadvantage of trying to create an African-American owned business in a white supremacist environment goes further to say that, This disadvantage, moreover, continues to inhibit the entry of African Americans into entrepreneurial occupations.6Common historic methodology suggests t...
