Author Talk: Black Business in Detroit with Dr. Kendra Boyd

The Author Series Committee welcomes Dr. Kendra Boyd, professor of African American history at Rutgers University, Camden. Dr. Boyd will be discussing her latest book, Black Entrepreneurship and Racial Capitalism in Detroit (2025, University of Pennsylvania Press). The book traces the rise and fall of the historic Black business community in Detroit.

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.

Copies of Dr. Boyd's book will be available for purchase from Detroit's own Source Booksellers.

About Dr. Boyd: Dr. Kendra Boyd is a scholar of African American history whose research focuses on Black business and economic history, urban history, and migration. She holds a B.S. in Business Administration from Wayne State University and a Ph.D. in History from Rutgers University–New Brunswick.

At Rutgers-Camden, Dr. Boyd is an affiliated faculty member in the Africana Studies Program and an affiliated scholar at the Center for Urban Research and Education (CURE). She is currently recruiting participants for the Black Camden Oral History Project. She began developing this project as a Public Humanities Fellow at the Mid-Atlantic Regional Center for the Humanities (MARCH) in 2022.

From 2025-2028 Boyd will direct the South Jersey Hub’s research for the Truth and Repair project.

She is currently working on a book project that examines Black women-led cooperative grocery stores during the 1960s and 1970s.

This is NOT a ticketed event, which means seats are available on a first-come, first-serve basis. Registration is still highly encouraged in order to receive important updates about this event. Questions? Email [email protected]

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