The Silver Rights Movement promises to explore Durham’s history of black entrepreneurship as a tool to analyze the challenges African American entrepreneurs face today.
Some of the businesspeople, scholars, and city officials who have already been interviewed for this documentary are: Nathan Garrett, Mayor Bill Bell, R. Edward Stewart, R. Kelly Bryant, Jr., Dr. Thomas Boston, Farad Ali, Andrea Harris, J.C. “Skeepie” Scarborough, Dianne V. Pledger, Victor Gordon, Carl Webb, and John Hope Franklin.
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In Durham, North Carolina, African Americans created a business community that has never been re-created anywhere else in this country. The Silver Rights Movement will explore this legacy—Durham's Black Wall Street and Hayti business districts—as the starting point of an examination of current economic disparities affecting African Americans on a national level. Why are there so few black-owned businesses? What insight does Durham's unique business history provide today's entrepreneurs? Drawing on original interviews, scholarly research, and archival records of black entrepreneurship, The Silver Rights Movement promises to be a film that will spark national debate on the economic history and current conditions of African Americans in this country.
During the Jim Crow era, black business communities in Atlanta, Tulsa, Wilmington, and Durham were able to thrive. While some of these communities were eventually destroyed by race riots, others, like Durham’s, established financial institutions that survive today. Enterprising African Americans like John Merrick (a former slave), Aaron Moore (Durham’s first black physician), and Charles Clinton Spaulding used their skills and resources to found North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company in 1898 and build it into a national leader in the insurance industry.
“To-day there is a singular group in Durham where a black man may get up in the morning from a mattress made by black men, in a house which a black man built out of lumber which black men cut and planed; he may put on a suit which he bought at a colored haberdashery and socks knit at a colored mill. . . . This surely is progress.”
—W.E.B. Dubois, 1911
Banks and insurance companies like North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance, Mutual Community & Savings Bank, and Mechanics & Farmers Bank all had headquarters on Parrish Street, the area of downtown Durham known as Black Wall Street. Other black-owned and -operated companies were found in the predominantly black area of town known as Hayti.
By the 1960s, many of the companies on Black Wall Street had expanded beyond their original headquarters and moved to other locations in Durham. Parrish Street became a historic landmark because of its unique past. With integration, the shackles of the Jim Crow era were removed, allowing African Americans the opportunity to do business outside of the black community. The construction of the Durham Freeway through the heart of Durham’s Hayti community beginning in 1963 effectively destroyed over 150 black-owned businesses, signifying the end of an era.
Durham’s Hayti district is now listed as one of North Carolina’s most distressed urban communities , and Durham’s historic Black Wall Street is in need of a face lift as abandoned buildings occupy this once vibrant black business district. Today, these places pale in comparison to their unique legacy of economic growth for the black community.
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