Kendra D. Boyd, "Freedom Enterprise: Black Entrepreneurship and Racial Capitalism in Detroit" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2025)

Jan 10, 2026

Kendra D. Boyd, an Assistant Professor of History at Rutgers University Camden, dives into Black entrepreneurship during the Great Migration, drawing from her forthcoming book, Freedom Enterprise. She highlights how Black Southerners, driven by dreams of liberation, shaped Detroit's business landscape. Boyd discusses the impact of racial capitalism on their journeys, the role of women in this narrative, and the challenges faced from urban renewal. Her insights reveal a rich tapestry of resilience, providing lessons for ethical urban policy today.

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INSIGHT

Personal Roots Of Research

Kendra Boyd links her interest in Black business history to hands-on experience with her father's small cleaning business and undergraduate business studies.
She combined business training with historical methods to study working-class and survival entrepreneurship in Detroit.

INSIGHT

Migration Framed As Entrepreneurship

Boyd traces migrant entrepreneurship from Southern origins to Detroit and asks what happened between migration and urban destruction.
She uses migrants' letters and archival clues to reconstruct businesses built before freeway-driven displacement.

INSIGHT

Small Businesses As Central Evidence

Boyd centers small, migrant-owned enterprises to challenge business historiography's focus on large firms.
She argues aggregate study of mom-and-pop firms is essential because they constituted the majority of Black businesses.

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The Great Migration saw more than six million African Americans leave the US South between 1910 and 1970. Though the experiences of migrant laborers are well-known, countless African Americans also left the South to pursue entrepreneurial opportunities and viewed business as key to Black liberation. Detroit's status as a mecca for Black entrepreneurship illuminates this overlooked aspect of the Great Migration story. In Freedom Enterprise, Kendra D. Boyd uses "migrant entrepreneurship" as a lens through which to understand the entwined histories of Black-owned business, racial capitalism, and urban space.

Freedom Enterprise follows Black Southerners' journeys to Detroit during the initial wave of migration in the 1910s and 1920s, through their efforts to build a prosperous Black business community in the 1930s and 1940s, to the destruction of that community through urban renewal projects and freeway construction in the 1950s and 1960s. Combining business and social history methods to analyze an eclectic archive, Boyd chronicles migrant entrepreneurs' experiences, highlighting tales of racial and economic violence, Black women's business organizing, illegal business, communist entrepreneurs, and cooperative economics.

Boyd uses the framework of racial capitalism to examine migrant entrepreneurs' experiences in twentieth-century America. In the Jim Crow South, African Americans worried about white mobs taking away their property, wealth, and lives. Though they sought refuge in Detroit, migrant entrepreneurs subsequently faced the loss of their livelihoods and the businesses they had spent decades building to the bulldozers of state-sponsored urban redevelopment initiatives. Southern migrants' "freedom enterprise"--their undertaking of attaining freedom through business--was curtailed by the reality of operating within the confines of US racial capitalism.

In tracing Black entrepreneurs across the Great Migration, Freedom Enterprise provides important insights into African Americans' activism for racial and economic justice and continued racialized wealth disparities.

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