Black Power, Inc.: Global American Business and the Post-Apartheid City explains the rise of black empowerment in the United States and southern Africa during the late twentieth-century. Black empowerment, defined as private and government programs promoting job-training, community development, and black entrepreneurship, flourished in the late 1960s and 1970s as a popular response to social unrest in black neighborhoods from North Philadelphia to Soweto. “Black Power, Inc.” analyzes the intellectual and financial investments made by American businesspeople, government bureaucrats, and black entrepreneurs in transforming black dissidents into “productive citizens” in an economic and civic sense. As these efforts spread, the transnational discourse of black empowerment intersected and appropriated a global Black Power politics. My project draws attention to the contestations between Black Power and black empowerment advocates across the diaspora. Drawing on corporate and “movement” records from the United States and South Africa, I reveal the connections between black internationalism and the post-war globalization of American capitalism in ways too often obscured by the separation of Business History and Global Black Studies. By prioritizing private capital, I furthermore explain Black Power’s demise in a way that reveals the seeds of political conservatism that blossomed within the global black freedom struggle
