Jack Salzman, Cornel West Struggles in the Promised

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omy that came to dominate the Mississippi Delta or Chicago's "Black Belt" differed
in fact very little from the Jewish economy either on the other side of the
Atlantic or from that forming in vast stretches of white America. 44
Additionally, Jews were not alone in selling to Blacks. In numerous American
cities, in parts of the Mississippi Delta and other regions of the south, Chinese
immigrants set up small stores to cater to Black customers. 45 Although by the
early 1930s Harlem had become the flashpoint of tension and resentment by
Blacks against Jewish merchants, many Italian, Greek, and Irish, as well as
Chinese, shopkeepers, also sold goods to Blacks there. 46 Likewise, in the early
decades of the twentieth century, Black immigrants from the West Indies also
flocked to areas like Harlem and carved out a place for themselves in the realm of
small business, and despite their shared racial heritage, they too were considered
"foreign."
With all these caveats in mind, the fact remains that Jews did establish an
intense and complicated business relationship with Black people across
America. 47 They sold to various non-Jews, blacks among them. They engaged in
commerce in many regions and neighborhoods, some where no Blacks dwelled, as
well as in those where African Americans predominated. A Jewish economy in
retailing developed as early as the 1840s in Oregon where few Blacks lived at that
time. In some locales, Jewish shopkeepers set up businessess among their former,
not so friendly, neighbors from Europe. In the western Pennsylvania coal fields
and steel towns, Polish and other Slavic immigrants lived in areas served primarily
by Jewish merchants; Poles on Chicago's West Side complained bitterly that
they once again found themselves in thrall to Jewish grocers and purveyors of
other goods. Slavic informants from the small towns of western Pennsylvania
recalled growing up with the belief that '"Jews meant shopkeepers,'" and that
Jews spent all their time coming up with ways to make money off the Slavic peoples.
In Chicago in the early twentieth century, Polish community activists
launched several "Swoj do Swojego" ("Patronize your own") campaigns. The
Jewish economy of the Mississippi Delta or Chicago's "Black Belt" hardly differed
from the Jewish economy forming elsewhere in America or that existed on the
other side of the Atlantic. 48
The commercial encounter became more pronounced in the aftermath of the
Civil War and the end of slavery. Commentators as different as Black activistintellectual
W.E.B. Du Bois and the southern apologist historian E. Merton
Coulter considered the entry of small numbers of Jewish merchants into the postemancipation
south as a notable event. Du Bois, in the 1903 edition of Souls of
Black Folk, claimed that Reconstruction saw the transition of power "from the
hands of Southern gentlemen.. .to those men who have come to take charge of the
industrial exploitation of the New South.. .thrifty and avaricious Yankees, shrewd
and unscrupulous Jews." 49 Coulter's history of Reconstruction placed the Jews
directly in contact with Blacks. "The end of the war," he wrote, "saw an invasion
of Jews to reap a harvest in trade; Sticking to their business and treating the freed-