tion to business history, more particularly to entrepreneurial history, might have enriched my insights. Nonetheless, the disclaimer stands: this study is less a business history than it is a social and intellectual history of a black business, the thesis being that the significance of the enterprise rests in its ethnic identity rather than in its economic identity, and that its history speaks less to the financial progress of a single black business than to the ideology of racial progress inherent to all black institutions. The history of the Company further speaks to the longstanding encounter between cultures, to the Afro-American search for a modus vivendi with a hostile environment, to AfroAmerican religion, politics, community organization, and social stratification, to the meaning of the New South, to the absorbing power of the American business ethos, and to the shame of American race relations. One other disclaimer: I do not pretend that this is a study of the black community of Durham. Sociologists have done that at least twice and it needs to be done again. One hopes, however, that through the eyes of a single institution, even with a distorted one-dimensional view, there can emerge useful insights on the larger black community that otherwise might not appear. The test of this assertion depends on the findings of future institutional studies and, of course, their ultimate synthesis.

The assumption throughout is that there is an inseparable relationship between ideas and institutions, and that the history of the North Carolina Mutual cannot be separated from the history of other Afro-American institutions, particularly the church and the mutual benefit society. Nor can the origins of the firm be seen apart from an aggressive Negro business movement born out of the deteriorating race relations of the New South, which for many black leaders stimulated a flight from politics and protest into religion, education, and business. Indeed, apart from Tuskegee Institute itself, the North Carolina Mutual stands as the most conspicuous institutional legacy of the ideas of racial self-help and economic solidarity -- ascendant elements in AfroAmerican thought exalted by Booker T. Washington at the turn of the century when the Company was founded.

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