From Jean Baptiste Point DuSable to Oprah Winfrey, black entrepreneurship has helped define Chicago. Robert E. Weems Jr. and Jason P. Chambers curate a collection of essays that place the city as the center of the black business world in the United States. Ranging from titans like Anthony Overton and Jesse Binga to McDonald’s operators to black organized crime, the scholars shed light on the long-overlooked history of African American work and entrepreneurship since the Great Migration. To...

In Moving Up, Moving Out**, Will Cooley discusses the damage racism and discrimination have exacted on black Chicagoans in the twentieth century, while accentuating the resilience of upwardly-mobile African Americans.** Cooley examines how class differences created fissures in the black community and produced quandaries for black Chicagoans interested in racial welfare. While black Chicagoans engaged in collective struggles, they also used individ...