National Negro Business League Conventions
Courtesy of The New York Public Library
Booker T. Washington founded the National Negro Business League (NNBL) 1900 as an organization that would teach younger generations of entrepreneurs essential skills for their success and as a space where they could gather and learn from each others successes and failures. NNBL annual conventions had been spaces with members could learn from Washington and his generation, build on their knowledge, and then pass it on to others in their local chapters and associations. The following is the documented intellectual capital that members accessed when they attended the food industry sessions of the 1913 NNBL convention in Philadelphia Pennsylvania: Potato Growing and General Merchandising [Italics my emphasis], Farming and General Merchandising, Marketing Watermelons and Cantaloupes, Poultry Raising—Making it Pay, Catering by Andrew J. Gay of Steubenville, Ohio; Our Experience and Successes in the Grocery Business by James S. Hardrick of Springfield, Missouri; My Steam Bakery by Howard Jones Danville, Virginia; Ice Cream Manufacturing by J. H. Madison, Boston, Massachusetts. NNBL members returned home from the conventions to their local chapters and passed on what they learned to others who then shared it with entrepreneurs in their networks.
