Many are undercapitalized and don't have the ability to weather extended slow periods as much as white merchants.
The movement fed on the daily discontents of impoverished black workers, and spewed its wrath at prosperous white merchants.
His mother was a slave, and his father was a white merchant and minister.
And merchants, black and white, have been more vocal in their desire to try to work together to boost commerce on the strip.
But following that move, a group of angry vendors called for a boycott of stores on 125th Street owned by white and Asian merchants.
A boycott of white merchants was declared, and a march to City Hall followed.
There is no comparable problem with other white merchants, students and school officials say.
There was a nasty confrontation between a white merchant and a black customer in Brooklyn.
Up and down South Jefferson Street, though, in the old brick commercial district, the white merchants refused to be quoted, for fear of alienating black customers.
Last December a similar boycott crippled white merchants in Boksburg, a town near Johannesburg.