Southern Suburb/Northern City: Black Entrepreneurship in Segregated Arlington County, Virginia

Abstract

Most scholarship on racial segregation in U.S. cities retraces the Great Migration, from the rural South to the urbanizing, industrializing North. Arlington County, Virginia, adjacent to the large, prosperous black community of Washington, D.C., provides a unique opportunity to study processes that transcended this dichotomy. During segregation blacks were limited to living and doing business in three of the County's 38 census tracts. Using census data, telephone records, and interviews with black residents, this paper explores the black-owned businesses that grew in Arlington during segregation and the fate of those businesses following integration, concluding that the nature of the businesses was largely determined by the County's unique context. The black neighborhoods were dispersed, lacking public transportation, with insufficient residents to support the self-contained business infrastructure found in many segregated cities of similar size. Conversely Arlington's black residents were welcomed in the extensive black-owned business infrastructure of nearby Washington, D.C.