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Given the established character of the African American community in
Baltimore, it is surprising to note that, in terms of class composition, this
community had a relatively very weak grouping of Black business people. As ira
De A. Reid pointed out, Baltimore had the fourth largest Negro population but was
ninth in the number of stores with Black proprietors. Moreover, Baltimore's 282
Black-owned stores did less business than stores in any other city with a Black
population of over 100,000, and less than five cities under 100,000. Most store
proprietors were not, of course capitalists in the full sense, for they employed no
wage labor; rather they were pan of the traditional petty bourgeoisie of small
owners. But like the small owners, larger capitalists were disproportionately scarce
in Baltimore: of 698 businesses of all sizes in the city in the early 1930s, only six had

so

gross incomes over $100,000 annually and only two took in more than $150,000.

Interestingly, the number of professionals — part of the salaried middle class,
or petty bourgeoisie -- in the Baltimore Black community was relatively large; in
Reid's words, this proportion was "more favorable in Baltimore than in the United
States as a whole." This was partly due, no doubt, to the improvements in Black
education in the 1920s that allowed more and more Black students to graduate high
school and go on to college. But the real demographic heavyweight in the Black
community was the Black working class. As will be shown below, approximately
883% of all employed African Americans in Baltimore were proletarians.

The social weight of the various classes in the community, and particularly
the relative weakness of Black bourgeoisie had ramifications for the character of
Black culture and the shape of freedom movement in Baltimore. But before
pursuing this point, it is necessary to step back for a moment and address a
conceptual problem.

"Black bourgeoisie" is a term that is often used ambiguously, and the
interpretations attached to it are often problematic. Stemming largely from the
work of E. Franklin Frazier, the Black bourgeoisie is frequently not defined as a