During and after Reconstruction, formerly enslaved Africans in the United States went about the business of establishing their own businesses, economy, and towns. Black agriculture was thriving. At the beginning of the 20th Century, Black people in the United States owned 14 million acres of land. However, by the 21st Century, 90% had been lost.
The National Negro Business League, founded in 1900 by Booker T. Washington, promoted the interests of Black businesses in cities nationwide. Washington advocated economic development as the best path to Black advancement and challenging Jim Crow segregation. In the 1980s, Philadelphia radio personality and civil rights activist Georgie Woods founded the United Black Business Association. The Association was highly successful in attracting grassroots entrepreneurs in Philadelphia and advocating on their behalf. The National Black Chamber of Commerce, Inc. (NBCC) was established in May 1993, with 13 chapters. The NBCC now has over 140 chapters nation- wide. Presently, every city/region in the United States has a Black Chamber of Commerce.
University of Texas business historian Dr. Juliet E.K. Walker, who is considered the nation’s leading scholar on Black business history, was the first to name the period from 1900 to 1930 in the United States as the “Golden Age of Black Business.” Segregation forced Black people to work together and become self-sufficient.
During the era of Jim Crow Segregation, Black entrepreneurs also had great success owning barbershops, beauty parlors, funeral homes, cafes and taverns, guest houses, and hotels. Many others were tradesmen. Several of my ancestors in Florida owned hotels, funeral homes, stores and were tradesmen. Owning land and businesses was the norm in most Black families in the South.
Despite what some people think, Annie Turnbo Malone was the first Black woman millionaire. It was she who hired Madam C.J. Walker and taught her the hair business. Around 1900 Malone developed her own chemical straightener and created an entire line of hair care products for Black women. In 1902 she and three assistants began selling her products door-to-door in St. Louis. Malone built a beauty, hair care, and cosmetic empire under the “Poro” brand and established branches in major US cities, Canada, the Philippines, the Caribbean, South America, and Africa. In 1918 she built Poro College, a multi-story building that housed the business offices, training facility, operations, and public gathering spaces for the local Black community.
Her training of sales agents created almost 75,000 jobs mostly, held by Black women and women of color. Additionally, she was a philanthropist who donated thousands to every HBCU in the nation. Malone set the stage for Joan and George Johnson’s hair-care company, Johnson Products, which in 1971 became the first Black-owned busi- ness on the American Stock Exchange.
Prosperous, self-sufficient Black people seemed to fill white racists with envy and rage. The Greenwood District in Tulsa, Oklahoma was an affluent Black community with a thriving business district referred to as “Black Wall Street.” Known as Greenwood Avenue, it included night-clubs, hotels, cafés, newspapers, clothiers, movie theaters, Black doctors’ and lawyers’ offices, grocery stores, beauty salons, shoeshine shops, and more. Many compared it and State Street in Chicago. In 1921, an inflammatory news re- port resulted in confrontations between a white mob (in- cluding law enforcement and agents of the government) and residents of Greenwood and the destruction of the Greenwood community. The “Tulsa Race Massacre” is one of the most significant events in Tulsa’s history.
A few years later, similar events occurred in Rosewood, a self-sufficient, prosperous Black town on the west coast of Florida. The middle-class Black residents owned a school, churches, a turpentine mill, a sugarcane mill, a baseball team, two general stores and were responsible for logging in the region. In January 1923, organized mobs of enraged white men from nearby towns believed a white woman was assaulted by a resident of Rosewood and terrorized its residents for several days, totally destroying the town in what is remembered as “The Rosewood Massacre of 1923.”
Alonzo Herndon, formerly enslaved, made a fortune through the ownership of barbershops. He used his fortune to establish Atlanta Life Insurance Company in 1905. The company survived difficult times for Black-owned insurance firms. One strategy for survival among Black insurance firms was to acquire new clients through the acquisition of smaller Black insurance companies. In 1985 Atlanta Life acquired Mammoth Life and Accident Insur- ance Company (founded in 1915 in Louisville, Kentucky), and in 1989 acquired Pilgrim Health and Life Insurance Company (founded in 1898 in Augusta, Georgia). From 1977 to 1989, 11 Black-owned insurance companies were merged or acquired.
In the early 1900s, Marcus Garvey and his United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) took the United States by storm. Promoting the philosophy of Black self-suffi- ciency. In 1918 he began a newspaper, Negro World, which had a circulation between 50,000 and 200,000 by 1920. In 1919 Garvey purchased an auditorium in Harlem named Liberty Hall and established the Negro Factories Corporation, which offered stock for purchase by Black people. The corporation owned three grocery stores, two restaurants, a printing plant, a steam laundry, several buildings and trucks in New York City alone. Garvey’s most famous economic venture was a shipping company known as the Black Star Line, established in 1919 as a way to promote trade and transport Black passengers “Back to Africa.”
Presently, United Bank is the only Black-owned bank in Philadelphia. However, Black banks in Philly flourished, beginning with Berean Savings & Loan, established in 1888 by the Drs. Matthew and Caroline Anderson in the basement of Berean Presbyterian Church, which was then located at 19th & Girard Avenue. Until its closing in 2011, Berean Bank was the oldest continuously operating Black- owned savings institution in the nation.
Major Richard Robert Wright, Sr. and his son Richard Robert Wright, Jr. founded the Citizens & Southern Bank & Trust in Philadelphia. By 1922, the bank had amassed $100,000 and 4,000 depositors, many who recently arrived from the South. By the end of the decade, it had grown to 11,000 depositors and about $2.5 million in deposits. In 1934 it became one of only eight Black-owned banks in the nation to qualify for the newly-created Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC). The bank helped launch dozens of Black businesses, and it became a trust company and provided Black Philadelphians with the loans they needed to start businesses and buy homes.
Black building and loan associations invested in residential mortgage loans, which helped Black people to invest in their businesses and purchase homes. Many survived the economic upheavals of the 1920s and 1930s. Other financial institutions owned by Black people in Philly included Douglass Building & Loan Association and
Women’s Building & Loan Association established by George W. Mitchell. Bankers Edward C. Brown and Andrew F. Stevens, Jr. established the Brown & Stevens Bank at 427 S. Broad Street. Institutions like Philadelphia’s his- toric Mother African Zoar Methodist Church also had credit unions. There are now over 30 Black-owned banks and credit unions in the United States.
Other Black entrepreneurs in Philadelphia focused on real estate and insurance. S. J. M. Brock is credited with being the first prominent Black realtor in Philadelphia who catered mostly to white clients. Brock also established the S.J.M. Brock Building & Loan Association in West Philly. John Cornelius Asbury had a successful insurance business and owned the historic Eden Cemetery. He also was a founder of Mercy Hospital, the Christian Street YMCA, and is the first Black person in Philadelphia to be ap- pointed an assistant district attorney in 1928.
Many Black businesses were family-owned like, Warley Bascom & Sons that specialized in upholstering, interior decorations, and cabinet work. A free African from Madagascar, Bascom came to Philadelphia in 1861 to establish a business that became one of the oldest and longest-lived businesses owned and operated by Black people in Philadelphia. It continued successfully under family manage- ment until 1974.
Black people frequently bemoan the fact that we currently have no place to showcase movies and entertainment that we produce. However in 1919, Brown and Stevens opened the palatial Dunbar Theatre, the first Black-built and-owned theater in Philadelphia. In 1921, the Dunbar was sold to John Trusty Gibson, one of the wealthiest Black men in Pennsylvania, who renamed it the Gibson. That acquisition made him the sole owner of all the major Black theatres in the city. Gibson began building his theatrical empire with the opening of his first theatre, the North Pole Theatre, in 1910. He invested half a million dollars to finance the New Standard Theatre on South Street in 1918. He was the first Black entrepreneur in Philadelphia to make such a large property investment. The Standard featured Vaudeville stars like Bessie Smith, Josephine Baker, and Ethel Waters. Gibson also ran the Theater Owners and Booking Association (TOBA) and was a di- rector of Douglass Hospital. In 1995, NBA Hall-of-Famer Earvin “Magic” Johnson’s Johnson Development Corporation opened state-of-the-art multiplex movie theaters in California, Atlanta, Houston, Cleveland, and Harlem. Johnson sold the theaters to Loews Cineplex Entertainment in 2004.
Born in Barbados, Frederick McDonald Massiah immigrated to the U. S. in 1909. He worked as a laborer during the day while studying architecture at the Pennsylvania School of the Fine Arts at night and earning a degree in civil engineering from Drexel Institute (now Drexel University) in 1915. By the early 1920s, Massiah became one of the first successful Black contracting engineers in the nation. His company was the general contractor for the Walnut Plaza Apartments in West Philadelphia. He also built U.S. Post Offices in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, in addition to Philadelphia’s Morton Housing Development — a $5 million project.
In 1942, John Johnson used his mother’s furniture as collateral for a $500 loan to start his first publication, Negro Digest. This was the launching pad for the largest Black-owned publishing company in the world. Black households in the United States and beyond all read Ebony and Jet Magazines.
In 1954, a new kind of Black-owned lodging opened in Birmingham, Alabama, coinciding with the Black Baptist convention. The A. G. Gaston Motel was built, owned, and run by pioneering Black entrepreneur Arthur George Gaston. Modeled after the Holiday Inns, the Gaston Motel in- cluded 32 rooms with air-conditioning and telephones. In 1963, the motel became a center for Birmingham’s Civil Rights Movement. Gaston also established several other businesses in Birmingham, including a bank, radio stations, the Booker T. Washington Insurance Company, a fu- neral home, and a construction firm.
In 1969 Warren H. Wheeler established Wheeler Airlines, the first Black-owned airline certified by the Federal Aviation Administration. Wheeler helped integrate major United States air carriers by qualifying a large number of Black pilots.
Roy Clay, Sr., known as the “Godfather of Silicon Valley,” is a vital player in the development of the modern technology industry. In the 1970s he established Rod-L Electronics and invented the first electronic equipment safety testing device certified by Underwriters Laboratory (UL). The ROD-L tester is used on HP, IBM, AT&T, and Xerox production lines, and its sticker is on the companies’ computer products to show that they were UL certified. The Rod-L tester continues to be the standard.
James Brown was not only the “Godfather of Soul,” by the end of the 1960s, he owned a publishing company and three radio stations. Stevie Wonder has owned an FM radio station since 1977, which is one of only two Black-owned commercial radio stations in California. Black entrepreneurs currently own 168 of 10,315 commercial AM and FM radio stations in the United States. In 1991, Black Entertainment Television (BET) became the first Black-controlled TV company listed on the New York Stock Exchange. Robert L. Johnson became the nation’s first Black billionaire after selling BET to Viacom in 2001 for $3 billion. Forbes first listed Oprah Winfrey as a billionaire in 2003 with a $1 billion net worth. The head of her own media conglomerate, Winfrey’s current net worth is $2.7 billion.
Eddie C. Brown, born in impoverished rural Florida, found success in finance with the founding of Brown Capital Management in 1983. As of December 2020, the firm has $18 billion in assets under management. He and his wife established the Eddie C. and Sylvia Brown Family Foundation in 1994 and gave a multi-million dollar gift to establish the Brown Center at Maryland Institute College of Art and the Brown Capital Management Faculty Institute of Entrepreneurship at University of Maryland, Baltimore County.
That brings us to Robert F. Smith. The entrepreneur, who in 2000 co-founded the Vista Equity Partners investment firm, is said to be the richest Black person in the United States and according to Forbes is worth over $7 billion. The company, which invests solely in software, data, and technology companies has capital commitments of $46 billion. Smith is a major philanthropist, who through his Fund II Foundation, pledged to pay the entire student loan debt of the 2019 Morehouse College graduating class and donated $1.5 million to the school to be used for scholarships and a park. Smith also gave $20 million to the National Museum of African-American History & Culture.
According to the United States Census Bureau, Black businesses are now more than 1.5 million strong with sales exceeding $88 billion. Research by the University of Georgia’s Selig Center for Economic Growth found that Black consumers have the buying power of nearly $1 trillion. Let’s use that economic power to support Black-owned businesses, institutions, and our communities.
