“We Mean Business”: Chicago Businessman S. B. Fuller’s Conservation Vision of Civil Rights

During the modern civil rights movement, Black Chicago businessman S. B. Fuller conceptualized a conservative vision for achieving African American progress. Oriented around Black economic development and independence, rather than protest and civil rights legislation, Fuller advocated an alternative to the liberal integrationist goals of many civil rights leaders. During the early 1960s, Fuller’s conservative ideas garnered harsh criticism from many mainstream civil rights advocates, like his fellow Black Republican Jackie Robinson. Interestingly, however, Fuller himself and his vision for Black progress were vigorously defended by African American letters to the editor in the Black press at the time. I argue that this groundswell of not-so-silent support for Fuller, not to mention Fuller himself, represents one of many examples that can be offered of a substantive, organic, well-articulated, and underappreciated Black conservatism that existed during the modern civil rights era