Profs & Pints Baltimore: Black Thinkers and Black Capitalism

Profs and Pints Baltimore presents: “Black Thinkers and Black Capitalism,” on the origins and evolution of African American efforts to use business to build wealth, with Kimya Nuru Dennis, former professor of sociology and criminal studies at Salem College, community advocate, and scholar of Black economic development.

[Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Available at https://www.ticketleap.events/tickets/profsandpints/black-capitalism. Doors open at 3. The talk starts at 4:30. The room is open seating.]

Although very much part of the broader economy, African American-owned businesses have a distinct history, their emergence and growth being the product of conscious efforts to use enterprise and alternative economic approaches to empower the historically oppressed.

Learn about the intellectual origins of Black capitalism and the history and future of Black economic development with Dr. Kimya Nuru Dennis, a researcher, educator, advocate, and frequent public speaker focused on improving Black health, education, and economics.

She’ll start by discussing how leading Black thinkers of the late-19th century and early-to-mid 20th century came up with the foundational ideas of Black capitalism in response to the economic conditions of their time. We’ll look at the economic ideas expressed by Booker T. Washington in Up from Slavery and consider how his work influenced Marcus Garvey in forming the Universal Negro Improvement Association. We’ll examine the discussions of capitalism in W.E.B. Du Bois’s early work as well as Maggie Lena Walker’s chartering of a bank and other resources.

We’ll also look at how the rise of Black capitalism has been fostered by our nation’s adoption of non-capitalist economic policies—limits on and exceptions to the free market intended to address poverty and safeguard low-wage workers’ rights and health. We’ll consider the role played in their adoption by labor organizations formed by white American blue-collar workers and European immigrant workers, and we’ll discuss how non-capitalist European economics took root here before the Great Depression and became a bigger factor through the social welfare and other tax-funded government services established under Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal.

Building on Huey P. Newton’s observation that Black capitalism can be beneficial if both careful and strategic, we’ll contemplate the continued need for the same sorts of integrated economic approaches first embraced by Black trailblazers in the late-19th century and early-to-mid 20th century.

The talk will be open to questions and discussion and hold great value to those who want to learn more about African Americans’ economic past and are concerned with their economic future. (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID.)

Image: Photos of Marcus Garvey (Library of Congress) and Maggie Lena Walker (National Park Service).