KOLUMN Magazine
In the story Americans like to tell about commerce, the “small business” is a neutral character: a plucky shop with a bell on the door, a proprietor who knows customers by name, a tidy moral about hard work and risk. But in the nineteenth-century South—and especially in the small towns that were being knit into modern life by railroads, tourism, and the new power of municipal government—commerce was never neutral. The market had a color line. Credit had a color line. Even a storefront’s physical location could be determined, not only by rent and foot traffic, but by the informal and formal enforcement of racial boundaries.
That is what makes McKenzie’s Groceries & Confectioneries so instructive, and so quietly extraordinary. According to a local history account cited in a National Park Service historic resource study and echoed by the City of Hendersonville’s own Black history materials, the earliest recorded Black commercial enterprise in Henderson County, North Carolina, was a confectionery shop owned by C. E. McKenzie—one that provided “groceries, sweets, candles, soap, tea, coffee and spices.”
It is easy to glide past a sentence like that, to treat it as a charming artifact of local color—candles and sweets in a mountain town, a shopkeeper with good instincts. But the more honest reading is that the sentence is a compressed history of Black life after emancipation: the pursuit of economic self-determination in a society that had reorganized itself to prevent it. In a county where Black residents were a minority, and in a region where white supremacy politics would harden into a regime of social control, a Black-owned grocery and confectionery was never merely retail. It was infrastructure. It was a community node. It was a test case.
McKenzie’s shop sits, historically, at the beginning of a Black business lineage that would later include barbers, pressing clubs, cafés, upholsterers, funeral homes, and other enterprises—some briefly surviving, some lasting decades—each one doing double work: meeting daily needs while also building a measure of collective safety and pride. The City of Hendersonville’s public history page, assembled with community partners and local historical resources, frames McKenzie’s as the first documented example in the county. The National Park Service study offers the sharper, more sobering context: small businesses like McKenzie’s often had “difficulty securing credit,” relied on “cash” purchases at “high volume,” were pushed toward locations near Black neighborhoods because better sites were “barred” to them, and competed against white businesses that typically outmatched them in selection, pricing, and service.
Those conditions matter because they explain why such a business was both fragile and profound. A Black store could be successful in the narrow sense—steady customers, a known proprietor, perhaps a modest accumulation—but still operate under constant structural disadvantage, a kind of economic undertow. The shop’s significance, then, is not simply that it existed. It is what its existence required: navigation of the county’s racial order, improvisation around denied credit, and the steady social labor of keeping a place open where Black customers could buy necessities and small pleasures with less fear of humiliation.
To treat McKenzie’s as a lens is to see how Black enterprise functioned in many American towns: not as an accessory to civil rights history, but as one of its earliest, most persistent forms.
Hendersonville’s growth—and the narrowing of Black options
Hendersonville, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, was a town growing into a particular identity: a mountain destination, a commercial crossroads, a place whose downtown life was shaped by small retail, hotels, boarding houses, and services catering to residents and visitors. Growth, however, did not distribute itself evenly. The National Park Service study, which traces Black community life and institutions in the region, situates Black labor as central to the county’s development—work in hotels, houses, fields, and skilled trades—while also describing the limitations placed on Black advancement by a “white supremacy regime.”
Across the South, the decades after Reconstruction saw the dismantling of many of the period’s political gains and the consolidation of Jim Crow norms. For Black residents, this meant that economic mobility often depended on self-provisioning—building businesses that served Black customers because white-controlled markets could be hostile, exclusionary, or violently policed. Institutions and enterprises formed ecosystems: churches, mutual aid, schools, social clubs, and storefronts.
In that ecosystem, a grocery and confectionery shop has a particular kind of gravity. It is not specialized like a trade; it is not occasional like certain services. Food and household basics are recurrent needs. A place that sells tea and coffee and spices is not only selling ingredients; it is selling the means to maintain domestic life with some continuity and choice. Candles and soap are the basics of illumination and cleanliness—two things linked to respectability politics in the era, but also simply to comfort and health. And “sweets,” in the constrained economy of Black life under segregation, are not trivial. A confectionery is a small permission: for a child to feel included in a ritual of treats; for adults to claim a moment of pleasure without entering a white space where dignity could be bargained away at the door.
McKenzie’s shop, then, can be read as both a business and a social technology. It offered a micro-environment where Black customers could transact without the added tax of racial performance that often came with white proprietors: the forced politeness, the risk of insult, the requirement to accept unfair pricing or degraded service because there were no alternatives. A Black-owned shop did not erase the pressures of the larger system, but it could soften them.
This is one reason Black businesses have repeatedly served as “safe places” and community anchors—an observation made in historical interpretations of Black entrepreneurship during Jim Crow. The safety was not only physical. It was psychological and civic: a place where information moved, where community norms were reinforced, where the very act of buying from one’s own community could feel like a small assertion of collective strength.
The tyranny of credit, and the power of cash
If you want to understand why so many early Black businesses were precarious, follow the problem of credit.
Credit is a kind of permission slip issued by institutions and networks: banks, wholesalers, landlords, and informal lenders. In the post–Civil War South, those permissions were often withheld from Black entrepreneurs or priced in ways that made growth difficult. The National Park Service study’s account of McKenzie’s makes the point in plain language: businesses like his “had difficulty securing credit” and therefore needed “a high volume” of customers paying “cash” to make a profit. Cash-only commerce is often romanticized now as quaint or disciplined. In the context of segregation, it was frequently imposed and punishing. Cash-only means you cannot smooth risk across time. You cannot easily stock up ahead of demand. You are vulnerable to any seasonal downturn, any local disruption, any family emergency.
And yet there is another truth alongside that vulnerability: cash is also independence from the humiliations of borrowing under unequal terms. A cash purchase is final. It does not require a white intermediary’s endorsement. It does not create a paper trail that can be used for control. When Black customers supported Black businesses with cash—especially when those businesses could not access credit on fair terms—they were doing more than buying goods. They were financing an institution in real time.
This dynamic helps explain the emotional resonance of “Buy Black” movements, both historically and in modern revivals. The Guardian’s reflection on the long history of Black purchasing power describes an earlier “Buy Black” ecosystem—barber shops and banks, hotels and pharmacies, and “everything in between”—as a form of community infrastructure built under exclusion. Contemporary reporting continues to note that barriers to capital persist, with Black-owned businesses often facing higher denial rates and tighter lending conditions than their white counterparts—a modern echo of the same structural choke points.
McKenzie’s era did not have the same data dashboards or public small-business programs. It had relationships, reputation, and the daily calculus of whether enough people would choose your counter today to keep you open tomorrow. The shop’s endurance, to the extent it endured, would have depended on a local version of what later activists called “selective patronage”—the practice of directing spending to reinforce community institutions. The phrase “double duty dollar,” used in the early twentieth century to capture how a dollar spent in Black businesses could both buy goods and “advance the race,” emerged later than McKenzie’s earliest years, but it describes the same logic: consumer choice as community strategy.
In Hendersonville, where Black residents were often constrained in employment options and subject to the civic and social dominance of whites, that strategy would have had particular urgency. McKenzie’s shop was not just a seller of commodities. It was a local mechanism for wealth retention—however small—and for the shaping of a Black public sphere within a town that did not readily grant Black people public space.
Location as policy: Where a Black store could exist
There is a detail in the National Park Service study that deserves more attention than it usually gets in summaries: businesses like McKenzie’s were often located near Black neighborhoods because “more profitable locations were often barred to them.”
That sentence is a short description of a long practice: the control of Black mobility through geography. In many towns, the best retail corridors were informally or formally restricted, whether through covenants, harassment, selective enforcement of ordinances, or the quiet power of landlords who simply would not rent to Black tenants. Location is destiny in retail. A storefront on the main commercial artery can turn casual foot traffic into regular customers. A storefront set back, placed near a marginalized neighborhood, must work harder for every sale.
But there is a paradox in this forced clustering: it can also create Black business nodes. When a Black store is placed near Black homes and institutions, it can become more than an economic unit. It can become a neighborhood commons. It can anchor an informal network of mutual aid: someone’s credit with the proprietor, someone else’s job lead overheard by the register, the quiet circulation of news and warnings.
This is not sentimental speculation; it is consistent with broader accounts of how Black business districts formed and functioned under Jim Crow. A Federal Reserve historical essay on Black business districts notes that segregation reshaped clientele and commercial patterns, often forcing Black-owned businesses into serving Black customers while constraining market access—conditions that could produce concentrated Black commercial life even as they reflected exclusion.
McKenzie’s shop—selling groceries and sweets and household basics—would have been particularly suited to this role. People had to return weekly, sometimes daily. The proprietor had to be present. The shop became a steady social interface. And because the goods included both necessities and small luxuries, the customer base could span age and class within a Black community: workers needing staples; families seeking treats; church members buying supplies for home and gatherings.
The shop’s location, then, is not merely a footnote. It is a clue to how Black life organized itself under restriction: moving inward to survive, turning proximity into resilience.
The shop as a counter-public: Dignity, information, and the everyday politics of commerce
There is a temptation, when writing about historic Black enterprise, to treat business as separate from politics—as if politics belonged to courthouses and legislatures and protests, while business belonged to the private world of profit. That division does not hold up under Jim Crow, because the regime itself made ordinary transactions political. When a person is barred from equal access to services, the creation of alternative services becomes a political act, whether or not it is framed that way.
McKenzie’s shop offered Black residents a place to buy, but also a place to be. That distinction matters. The National Park Service study and the City of Hendersonville’s history materials are careful to present McKenzie’s within a larger chronology of Black institutions and businesses in the county—schools, churches, civic clubs, later enterprises—suggesting that business was part of a community’s self-making, not merely its economy.
A grocery-confectionery is an especially revealing institution because it straddles the domestic and the public. People come in with private needs—food for the house, soap for bathing, tea for mornings—and encounter neighbors, overhear conversations, receive guidance. It is difficult to reconstruct these scenes with archival precision because the most important exchanges were oral and ephemeral. But the social function is legible in the pattern of Black business life across the United States: barbershops as civic salons, beauty shops as organizing hubs, restaurants and cafés as meeting points, funeral homes as institutional pillars. The Henry Ford Museum’s historical writing on Jim Crow-era Black entrepreneurship notes that Black businesses served as symbols of progress and places where conversation and ideas could flow—raising consciousness and reinforcing solidarity.
McKenzie’s shop likely served an analogous function in Hendersonville’s Black community, even if it did so quietly and without the language later generations would adopt. In towns where Black residents might be surveilled in white spaces, the Black-owned store could be a low-risk environment for gathering. The simple act of lingering a few minutes—asking about someone’s family, passing along work opportunities, sharing news of a church event—could be the kind of community glue that makes institutions durable.
And durability, in this context, was an achievement. The Park Service study emphasizes how often small Black businesses failed because of structural disadvantages—credit barriers, location restrictions, competition with better-resourced white enterprises. A business that lasted even a few years could leave social traces: relationships, habits of mutual support, a sense that Black ownership was possible in a town that often tried to define Black people primarily as labor.
Success, measured honestly
To talk about McKenzie’s “success” requires careful definitions, because modern business metrics can mislead when applied backward. There may not be surviving ledgers showing revenue growth or profit margins. There may be no surviving photographs of the shopfront, no advertisements preserved in easily searchable archives. Local history sometimes preserves what the broader record does not: names, reputations, brief descriptions.
In such cases, “success” should be understood in layers.
One layer is the simple fact of establishment. A Black-owned commercial enterprise that sold a varied inventory—groceries and imported commodities like tea and coffee, plus household goods—required supply chains. It required initial capital. It required a space. It required a customer base willing and able to spend cash. In a county where Black residents faced occupational confinement and political marginalization, the creation of such a business was itself an accomplishment.
Another layer is survival across time, however long. The Park Service study makes clear that many businesses failed. If McKenzie’s is remembered as a county’s earliest recorded Black enterprise, the likelihood is that it left enough imprint—enough memory, enough documentation—to be included in later research. Memory is not proof of profitability, but it is evidence of presence and consequence.
A third layer is community function. A business can be economically modest and still socially large. In Black communities, especially under segregation, the social function of a business could be part of its economic logic: people patronized a shop not only for price or selection, but because it was theirs—because it treated them as full customers, because it employed people, because it represented autonomy. This is the logic later captured in arguments for supporting Black-owned businesses as a method of countering systemic disadvantage. Contemporary reporting continues to show that access to capital remains unequal, and that consumer and institutional support can shape whether Black businesses thrive or stall.
A fourth layer is symbolic success. Even when Black capitalism has been constrained by systemic barriers—an argument developed forcefully in modern scholarship and public writing—Black enterprise has still served as evidence of capability and ambition in the face of structured denial. The Atlantic, in discussing the “unfulfilled promise” of Black capitalism, emphasizes that the constraints were not merely individual but structural, rooted in discrimination and broken public commitments across generations. McKenzie’s shop belongs to the earlier chapters of that story: Reconstruction’s partial openings followed by tightening restrictions, with Black entrepreneurs carving out narrow lanes of possibility.
In that light, McKenzie’s “success” is best understood as a form of strategic endurance: making a business work well enough, long enough, to matter.
Why groceries and sweets mattered: The politics of provision
The inventory list—groceries, sweets, candles, soap, tea, coffee, spices—reads like a household poem. It also reads like a set of contested rights.
Take tea and coffee. These were goods tied to national and global trade, associated with middle-class routines and hospitality rituals. Selling them in a Black-owned shop meant connecting Black consumers to broader material culture without requiring them to subject themselves to white retailers who might demean them or deny them. It also meant that a Black proprietor had found a way into supply chains that were not designed for him.
Take spices. Spices carry memory and identity. In Black Southern cooking, seasoning is not a minor detail; it is technique, heritage, and pride. Access to spices is access to flavor, to the ability to make meals that satisfy more than hunger. In an era where Black households were often constrained by low wages and exploitative labor structures, to keep a kitchen stocked with spices was to maintain a standard of living that defied narratives of deprivation.
Take soap and candles. These are “boring” goods until you understand what they signified in the racial ideology of the time. White supremacy often trafficked in stereotypes of Black dirtiness and disorder—myths used to justify exclusion. A Black shop selling soap is not merely selling cleanliness; it is facilitating self-definition. Candles likewise are domestic technology: light to read by, to work by, to pray by. Before widespread electrification, lighting was a daily necessity with real economic implications. A household with reliable illumination can extend productive hours. A community with access to basic goods can resist the fragility that poverty imposes.
And take sweets. Sweets are often dismissed as frivolous. But in community life, treats are tied to childhood, to holidays, to church events, to small rewards after hard labor. A confectionery is where a child can feel seen and indulged, where a parent can offer a small joy. In the context of a society structured to deny Black joy, a candy counter can be, in its own way, radical.
This is not to sentimentalize. It is to recognize that material life is political life when the distribution of comfort is racially policed. McKenzie’s shop functioned as a local defense against scarcity and humiliation.
Competition with white businesses—and the rigging of “the free market”
One of the more bracing lines in the Park Service study is its description of competition: white businesses “routinely outdistanced” Black businesses in “merchandise selection, prices, and services.” That is a plain description of how a supposedly free market can be structured by unequal inputs. Better selection often comes from easier access to wholesalers and credit. Lower prices often come from scale, supply advantages, and preferential treatment by lenders and distributors. Better services often come from staffing, capital improvements, and stable cash flow.
To say that McKenzie competed in such an environment is to say he competed against a rigged system—and did so without the legal protections or institutional support that modern entrepreneurs (in theory) can access. The rigging was not always explicit, but it was persistent: bank practices, landlord decisions, informal intimidation, civic exclusion, and consumer racism.
Modern reporting underscores that systemic discrimination against Black businesses has long histories and present continuities. The Washington Post, for example, has described how discriminatory legal regimes and practices historically stunted Black business growth and how Black communities that did manage to prosper were sometimes met with white violence and suppression. Hendersonville’s record is not reducible to one national template, but the structural logic is familiar: exclusion from mainstream capital and opportunity, plus the constant pressure of being a Black institution in a white-controlled civic environment.
This is why McKenzie’s shop cannot be treated as a quaint footnote. It is a case study in how Black enterprise operated within a political economy that systematically favored white firms.
The deeper significance: A store as a civic ancestor
The City of Hendersonville’s Black history page does something important when it lists McKenzie’s shop alongside later Black-owned businesses and institutions. It places the confectionery at the start of a lineage. This is not merely celebratory. It is historiographically meaningful. Communities often struggle to identify “firsts” because records are incomplete and because the achievements of marginalized people were not consistently documented by mainstream institutions. When a community can name an early Black business, it is usually because local researchers and elders have preserved evidence against the drift of forgetting.
That act of naming changes what the town believes about itself. It counters a narrative that Black presence was only labor, only service, only background. It asserts that Black residents were also builders of commerce and community infrastructure. It suggests that downtown life, and the county’s development, included Black initiative—not only white investment.
McKenzie’s shop is therefore an ancestor to other forms of Black civic life in Henderson County. It anticipates later institutions that would formalize the work of preserving history, such as museums and community archives. The City’s page notes the People’s Museum and Walk of Fame as a contemporary site for preserving Henderson County’s Black, Indigenous, and People of Color histories—an institutional effort that, in a different register, continues the work McKenzie did: creating a space where community identity is affirmed and made visible.
There is a parallel here to national debates about memory and erasure. When Black histories are not documented, towns can drift into myths of homogeneity. When they are documented, the story of place becomes more honest—and often more complicated. McKenzie’s shop complicates Hendersonville in productive ways: it shows Black ambition, but also the constraints that shaped it; it shows enterprise, but also exclusion.
What we can responsibly say—and what remains to be found
Ethical longform journalism is not only about telling a compelling story; it is also about marking the edges of what we know.
From the sources available in the public record, we can say with confidence that local historical research—reflected in a National Park Service historic resource study and the City of Hendersonville’s public history materials—identifies C. E. McKenzie’s confectionery/grocery shop as the county’s earliest recorded Black commercial enterprise, and describes its inventory as including groceries, sweets, candles, soap, tea, coffee, and spices. We can also say that the Park Service study situates McKenzie’s within a broader pattern of Black enterprise constrained by credit access, location restrictions, and competition with better-resourced white firms.
What we cannot yet say, based on the same accessible sources, is the full granular biography: McKenzie’s exact years of operation, the precise address, whether the shop moved locations, how long it survived, who worked there, and what specific community events were tied to it. Those details may exist in city directories, tax records, deed books, newspaper advertisements, church minutes, or family archives; they may require archival digging beyond easily searchable public webpages.
But the absence of micro-detail does not reduce the shop’s significance. In some ways, it clarifies the point: Black enterprises were often under-documented precisely because they existed at the margins of official attention. The story of McKenzie’s is, by definition, also a story about archival silence—and about the community work required to overcome it.
In practical reporting terms, the next layer of confirmation would likely come from local repositories—historical societies, genealogical collections, newspaper archives, and county records—where a journalist could triangulate names, dates, and locations. The Park Service study itself points to the presence of a Black History Research Committee and local history compilations, suggesting that substantial research exists in community-held formats.
Why McKenzie’s matters now
In the current American economy, “small business” is invoked as a unifying ideal. Politicians of all parties praise entrepreneurs. Corporations issue statements about supporting minority-owned suppliers. Consumers are urged to vote with their dollars. But without historical grounding, these invocations can become shallow—more branding than accountability.
McKenzie’s Groceries & Confectioneries offers a corrective. It forces us to see that Black enterprise has long existed not as a niche add-on to American capitalism but as an essential, continuous response to exclusion. It shows that Black business formation was often less about abstract “innovation” than about building access to basics: food, household goods, small comforts, and the dignity of being served without degradation. It shows that success required strategies shaped by discrimination—cash reliance, community patronage, geographic constraint—and that the celebrated “free market” was never free for everyone.
It also suggests that when we talk about “supporting Black businesses,” we should not frame the goal narrowly as charity or trend. The deeper goal is structural: to dismantle the conditions that made McKenzie’s path so steep in the first place. Modern reporting on lending disparities and systemic barriers underscores that those conditions, while changed in form, have not disappeared.
McKenzie’s shop, in the end, is a story about provision and power. It is about what it meant, in a small Southern county, for a Black proprietor to stand behind a counter and say—through the ordinary language of goods exchanged for cash—We can supply ourselves. We can build institutions. We can endure.
That message is not only historical. It is unfinished.