Building the Black Metropolis: African American Entrepreneurship in Chicago, a volume edited by Robert E. Weems and Jason P. Chambers, offers scholars an in-depth examination of black ingenuity in Chicago. In a nod to St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton's classic study of black urban life in Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City (1945), Weems and Chambers's own study of the black metropolis takes as its focus the slightly more narrow, and yet vastly understudied, phenomenon of African American entrepreneurship. “Geographically segregated in Chicago for much of its history and victimized by repeated outbreaks of violence, extralegal reprisals, and social and economic restrictions,” African Americans, as this collection demonstrates, exhibited a remarkable “entrepreneurial prowess” in helping to “[build] a viable commercial enclave within Chicago,” the remnants of which can still be found in the city today (p. 10).

Building the Black Metropolis addresses a number of key debates and problematics in the field, chief of which is the “myth of black business” (p. 11). Citing criticism from a range of disciplines and dispensations, Weems and Chambers explain how black business has been denigrated by, on the one hand, historians and sociologists for failing to follow the path of foreign-born immigrants in martialing ethnic solidarity to spur economic development and, on the other hand, by black leftists like Abram Harris, whose 1936 The Negro as Capitalist critiques African American elite for mimicking “the circumscribed existence, economic habits, social values, and the business ideals that dominate the surrounding white world.” While acknowledging some of the shortcomings of African American business, Weems and Chambers argue that “African American entrepreneurial development [must be placed] in its proper framework,” namely, as a response to pervasive “racial hostility” and a “source of racial agency” (pp. 11, 12).

Spanning more than a century and a half of black business history, the various chapters in this volume expand on the archives and methodologies associated with the history of capitalism in order to reveal interconnections between economic and racial formation in this Midwestern capital. In his introductory chapter, for example, Christopher Reed shows how African American migrants to Chicago after 1890 encountered widening restrictions on their political, social, and economic mobility. Rather than become discouraged, African Americans strove to capitalize—figuratively and literally—on segregation in an effort to build an economically independent Black Metropolis.

Subsequent chapters provide further detail regarding some of the key figures in Chicago's black business, including Robert Sengstacke Abbott, founder of the renowned Chicago Defender black newspaper, and Jesse Binga, who launched the first privately owned African American bank in the North. Some of the most innovative work appears in the latter half of the book, including Will Cooley's chapter on Jim Crow organized crime. Covering Chicago's black underground economy from the 1910s through the 1990s, Cooley reveals the raw deal African Americans received in that “white officials steered vice into segregated black neighborhoods, and then denied African Americans chances to take full advantage of these markets” through legal and extralegal violence aimed at undermining Chicago's black policy outfits (p. 132). While initially providing an important source of employment and financing for black Chicagoans—especially during the Great Depression, when a number of black banks and insurance companies went bankrupt—black policy gambling underwent a dramatic shift beginning in the late 1930s. Drawn by the profitability of black policy gambling, white gangs deployed violence and intimidation to usurp the place of black policy kings before policy was replaced by the growing drug and arms trade and discriminatory policing as the drivers of the underground economy. The “diffuse structure” of many more contemporary black gangs, combined with “the rising prevalence of firearms, the faltering postindustrial economy, and the incarcerating drive of the war on drugs encouraged cycles of violence” that prevented these gangs from “becom[ing] integrated in the politics-organized crime nexus that safeguarded earlier syndicates” (p. 143).

Cooley's essay is situated in the middle of several chapters on black business responses to new challenges and opportunities emerging out of efforts to dismantle Jim Crow. One of the unintended consequences of the civil rights movement explored here, as well as in other works by several of the volume's contributors, was the decline of black businesses. In the years following the 1964 Civil Rights Act, more than a few black enterprises went out of business and/or sold their operations to white-owned companies seeking to expand their share of the black market. By the dawn of the new millennium, many of Chicago's longstanding black businesses, including Supreme Liberty Life Insurance Company and the Chicago Metropolitan Assurance Company, had disappeared from the city's landscape. Challenging this narrative of decline, however, Jason P. Chambers, Juliet E. K. Walker, and Marcia Chatelain highlight the efforts of African Americans who carved out space for themselves within the post–Jim Crow economy as black advertising experts, media personalities, and McDonald's franchise owners.

Rather than failed capitalists, black businessmen and women in Chicago are shown here as quintessential entrepreneurs, “turn[ing] the disadvantages of their segregation into opportunities” for “prosper[ity] within the market system” (pp. 11, 13). Moreover, and along with other recent scholarship by people like N. D. B. Connolly, Tiffany Gill, Brenna Greer, and Joshua Clark Davis, Building the Black Metropolis addresses the contributions of black entrepreneurship to the development of the Black Metropolis, as well as some of the costs, materially, politically, and otherwise. All in all, this book offers a number of contributions to the field and will provide a valuable resource to business historians and scholars interested in race and capitalism more broadly.