Readers in African American history as well as American business history will find this study interesting, informative, and useful for the insights provided on the makings of a northern black business enterprise. - Juliet E. K. Walker. Examining the evolution of a prominent Chicago insurance company, the author provides a rare glimpse into the origins and operations of an African American business. The Chicago Metropolitan Assurance Company was founded in 1925 to provide burial insurance to working-class black Chicagoans. Over the next 60 years, however, the company expanded to serve African-Americans throughout Illinois, Indiana, and Missouri. Discriminatory lending practices by white-controlled banks often inspired pioneering black businesses such as Chicago Met to raise operating and investment capital through creative meansNsuch as gambling. These companies were crucial to economic development within black communities. They provided white-collar jobs to men and women otherwise denied access to such opportunities and helped create a black bourgeois class and culture. They exemplified black self-help ideology and nationalist inclinations in black working-class communities of the urban North.
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Because African Americans historically did not have access to insurance provided by white-controlled companies, black-owned and -operated insurance businesses turned out to be one of the first and most successful types of black enterprise. Evolving from mutual aid and church-related societies, companies such as Atlanta Life, Supreme Life, and North Carolina Mutual grew to be major corporations. Weems, an assistant history professor at the University of Missouri at Columbia, profiles Chicago Metropolitan Assurance Company, which, unlike those other companies, had more controversial beginnings. Originally founded in 1925 as the Metropolitan Funeral System Association, it relied on gambling income for capital. Originally submitted as Weems' doctoral dissertation at the University of Wisconsin, this history has been updated with an epilogue analyzing the "demise" of the Chicago company (it is now a division of Atlanta Life) and the problems faced by African American^-owned insurance companies in today's market. Weems' well-researched book provides an in-depth look not only at black-owned business but also at a then-new metropolitan black community. David Rouse
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