Volume 46, Number 9 · May 20, 1999
The Lost Tycoons
By Arthur Kempton
To Be Loved: The Music, the Magic, the Memories of Motown: An Autobiography
by Berry Gordy
Warner Books, 432 pp., (out of print)
Berry, Me, and Motown
by Raynoma Gordy Singleton
Contemporary Books, 320 pp., (out of print)
An Original Man: The Life and Times of Elijah Muhammad
by Claude Andrew Clegg III.
St. Martin's, 377 pp., $14.95 (paper)
Before Berry Gordy Jr. became the most conspicuously successful black entrepreneur of the twentieth century by selling black music to white people, American Negro fortunes were made in the self-service industries of a people whose intimate concerns others were indisposed to serve—like hair-care products, cosmetics, burial insurance, and ghetto publishing. These were family businesses built by extracting revenues from markets too narrow and out of the way to be worth bothering with for anyone who was able to burrow into the main vein. Because so many have, from time to time, succeeded in the 'informal' economy, and because, at least according to the Gallup organization, black Americans are the most religious people on earth, there has always been a lively commerce among them in sin and redemption. This has allowed some who are especially gifted at either to become, however transiently, 'n[egro] rich.'
Review, 9374 words
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