Our Black Year (33 page)

I don't think you need an MBA to understand that those companies that market their franchisee support with a little savvy would earn extremely robust returns. So many of these companies already have commercials showing Black managers and employees in their stores, and they show off their high-ranking Black officers in
Black Enterprise
and
Ebony
magazines.

Imagine what an impact they could make by showing off their Black
owners.
Consider the example of stores Magic Johnson owns. I'm pretty sure Starbucks never considered pushing its overpriced coffee in the Black community, and Black people always had to go to the suburbs or downtown to enjoy T.G.I. Fridays. Then Magic Johnson opened Starbucks and Friday's outlets in underserved Black areas, and they are some of the most successful stores in their corporations. That's because Black consumers love to say, “I'm going to Magic's Starbucks” or “I'm going to the Magic Johnson Friday's.” Lots of Black folks patronize those businesses, even when they cannot find a Magic Johnson–owned outlet, because they know those companies have made an investment in the Black community. It's called customer loyalty, and it is invaluable. Starbucks is a great example. The coffee company started a partnership with Magic's Johnson Development Corp. (JDC) in 1998 and has opened more than one hundred of what Starbucks calls “Urban Coffee Opportunities” locations in underserved neighborhoods from Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle to Denver, Chicago, Detroit, Atlanta, Washington, DC, and New York City. Those stores have helped jump-start economic development and strengthened the sense of community in neighborhood after neighborhood.

What else did we learn in our yearlong odyssey? Despite some of the ugly stuff we encountered, we learned that we had lots of supporters, the great majority of whom are Black, which I guess should come as no surprise.

Between April and December I spoke at six conferences, five universities, three churches, and was honored on six different occasions. We also organized six of our own events, like the wine-tasting fund-raiser at Tracye Dee's WineStyles and the holiday celebration at Mell Monroe's Welcome Inn Manor. That's twenty-six speaking engagements, not to mention dozens of media interviews that gave us broad exposure and got people thinking about the issues, even if a fair number of folks got angry. Because of how we positioned our experiment, because of the viral nature of our interviews and stories, because the centerpiece of our movement was the website, and because most of EE's exposure came from mainstream media coverage, our supporters were people who spend a lot of
time online, watch the major news networks, or read the papers and who were accustomed to social networking. There are about fourteen thousand now between the Facebook fans and the more than eight thousand folks registered on our website, and at least half are business owners and professionals. Our Facebook group is larger than that of the National Urban League and the Rainbow PUSH Coalition, two established organizations with millions in their coffers, chapters all over the world, and dozens of major corporate sponsorships and celebrity endorsements. I think that's an indication of how serious people were about our effort.

Thanks to The Empowerment Experiment, our network has multiplied, and we've connected with many visionaries, activists, and business and community leaders. Between April and August of 2010 I spoke at twenty events, including giving keynote addresses at events hosted by a couple of prominent business groups—the FraserNet PowerNetworking Conference in Atlanta and the National Alliance of Market Developers annual conference in Baltimore. As for 2011, I racked up more than eighteen speaking engagements in the first seven months, including major addresses at the National Urban League's national conference, the National Association of Black Accountants' national conference and expo, FraserNet again, and the US Black Chamber's annual conference. I'd have hit a few more, but I had this little story to write, and I promised to avoid being away from the family every week. I still find time to visit my father twice a month in Atlanta.

In addition to the speeches I've been serving on panels and speaking for the community as an expert on economics, entrepreneurship, and business. In the summer of 2011 I represented EE at the inaugural White House Briefing to Community Leaders, where the president—my old law school prof—offered his support to community activists like me. Michael Blake, the director of the White House Office of Public Engagement and President Obama's liaison to the African American community and minority business, invited me. Donald Cravins, the chief of staff and chief counsel for the Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship, has asked me to testify to the Senate on behalf of Black businesses and economically distressed Black neighborhoods that need
more local businesses investing in the community. In addition, the chief diversity officer at Office Max asked me to deliver a keynote address to their minority suppliers and the company's senior management during a swanky all-day event the company put on specifically to recruit high-quality minority prospects and create a forum to enhance the value of the supplier diversity program. They could have asked a celebrity to do it, but they asked me, and it was the first event of its kind. I shared our journey and delivered a business case for supplier diversity that explained how substantive supplier diversity can increase sales. I received a standing ovation after closing my speech with these words, “Do Good. Make Good. Make Good Money.” Office Max received letters from Hispanic, Asian, and White women business owners praising the company for partnering with The Empowerment Experiment and supporting EE's vision of conscious consumerism. Kraft's Supplier Diversity Lead was there. She has decided to have a similar event for their suppliers, and guess who will be delivering a speech urging Kraft's executives to invest their marketing dollars in supplier diversity? That's right.

That investing simply isn't happening fast enough, as the plight of so many Black-owned businesses we came to know painfully demonstrated. My favorite wine store, WineStyles South Loop, run by my dear girlfriend Tracye Dee, closed in August 2010. She just didn't have the liquidity to keep the store afloat. Jordan's Closets couldn't make it either. The same month Tracye closed, Joslyn and Jera converted to an online-only operation. Then, in the spring of 2011, they closed altogether. When she explained, “We just weren't getting the business we needed,” I felt my heart drop into my stomach.

The same fate struck two of my other favorite Bronzeville establishments: Sensual Steps Shoe Salon, which had survived five years under my beloved Nicole Jones, and Bronzeville Coffee Shop. David and Michelle Powell at God First God Last—God bless 'em—keep plugging away. But the last time I drove by what was Farmers Best, it was a barred-up, hollow shell. I had to turn my head.

There have been uplifting moments too, often in the form of individuals touched by the hope that The Empowerment Experiment can
spark. Corey Tabor heard me speak in February 2011 at the University of Texas at Austin. Tabor, an African American preacher at a multicultural parish and a car sales rep—I love that combination—grew up in Abilene, Texas, in a mixed-race environment. Not until he attended the University of Texas at Austin did he start investigating more deeply his African American heritage. He ended up establishing a ministry for Black students at UT. He told me he'd always wanted to commit to buying Black, and he did patronize the one Black-owned business that all Black men commonly patronize: the barbershop. Doing much more seemed overwhelming and pointless to him.

But something about seeing the stand our family took gave him pause.

“The first thing that caught my attention was how one family could make that big of a difference,” Tabor said. “It was one decision made by two people that began this movement, and I think we often forget that movements start with individuals who are not comfortable with the status quo.”

Two days after hearing my talk Tabor lined up quotes from a Black-owned insurance agency and a Black-owned lawn-care provider. He checked to see whether a Black physician had room for an additional patient and contacted a Black accountant. Corey Tabor is one man making a difference in large part because he believes he can, and so often, that belief is just about all it takes.

I'm also inspired when I help White folks understand that this idea of ours is not racist but rather something that adds to the universal good. For example, when I gave that speech in Austin, almost everyone in the audience of about 250 people was White. Like the talk at Georgia State and another one at Belmont University in Nashville, looking over that audience in Austin was a little unsettling at first. But it went well. Afterward, a couple of White students told me they'd originally come with the intention of publicly declaring that I was a militant Black racist. Instead, they listened to my talk and apologized. Then they asked where they could find businesses to support. I nearly cried.

A similar scenario occurred when I was invited to speak to the faculty members of the Chicago chapter of Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship
(NFTE) during their annual retreat held at Northwestern University. A mostly White organization, NFTE is a popular, well-funded, and corporately sponsored global initiative that concentrates on teaching minority youth entrepreneurship in high school and helping them create their own profitable businesses before they turn twenty-one. After the lecture to approximately fifty teachers, the great majority of them White, I received a standing ovation. The president asked me to stay involved with the group and serve as a judge for their business plan competition.

Beyond individual transformations, larger efforts to foster buying Black are cropping up. One of the most exciting is a program sponsored by the Houston Citizens Chamber of Commerce, the second-oldest Black chamber of commerce in the United States—with ties to Booker T. Washington's National Negro Business League—and the National Black MBA Association's Houston chapter. Called the Economic Empowerment Initiative, it's like EE on steroids. One hundred members of the Houston chapter of the National Black MBA Association are looking to buy Black and track the experience, and the program is spearheaded by Eric Lyons, president and CEO of the Chamber of Commerce. He told me he was inspired when he saw John and me on CBS's
Early Show
in July 2009.

Another example is our partnership with the nonprofit Powered by Action, founded by Andre Hughes, global managing director of Accenture and Cisco Business Group. PBA's mission is to mobilize people, companies, and institutions to transform distressed communities around the world into self-sustaining entities. Although new, PBA is already operating in a remote village in Ghana, where the organization is employing local residents to build a school as the first step in overhauling that community, as well as in the troubled Chicago suburbs of Ford Heights and Chicago Heights, where PBA is helping with an incentive-based student-performance plan.

We are working to integrate EE's mission to help people find and support quality Black-owned businesses into PBA's creation of self-sustaining communities. We could do that by designating a struggling neighborhood, like Austin on the West Side, as a PBA target community
and including self-help economics as a component of the blueprint for making it self-sustaining.

Beyond all that, EE has fans in the pop-culture world, including singer and music producer Kandi Burruss and singer Tionne “T-Boz” Watkins, who have hosted EE events and made public statements of support. We are discussing corporate sponsorship of an EE National Tour with General Motors, Walgreens, OfficeMax, Kraft, Pitney Bowes, American Airlines, Bank of America, Delta, Dell, Exelon, and UPS. The plan would involve barnstorming in ten or so markets with high concentrations of African Americans and feature upscale events at Black-owned venues where we would use Black vendors, products, and professionals. Those companies would promote their supplier diversity initiatives, and our entrepreneurs could get some face time with major corporate prospects. These companies sponsor events like this all the time in order to market to Black consumers. By working with us, they'd get the chance to promote and facilitate their supplier, franchisee, dealer, and vendor diversity.

We did one such event, supported by General Motors Southeast, in August 2010 in Atlanta, where we featured local Black GM dealers, an upscale woman's boutique, and a cognac company. The hosts were
Rolling Out
magazine, a top-quality, national weekly found in twenty markets across the country, and the Atlanta Metropolitan Black Chamber of Commerce.
Rolling Out
has since become the official media partner of the EE National Tour, promoting and covering all my speaking engagements, showcasing EE entrepreneurs in the magazine and on its very popular website, and helping organize events. Owned by Munson Steed, a community and business leader, friend, and EE entrepreneur,
Rolling Out
is located in and employs from the Black community. The magazine and its parent company, Steed Media, fund entrepreneurship and educational programs that help the African Americans they serve and represent in their media.

So in some ways prospects look encouraging. I'm constantly turning down invitations, trying to limit them to twice a month. Next year, if we get some help tending to Cara and Cori, I might be speaking to groups once a week.

Despite all this I can still get trapped in gloomy places. I sometimes wonder whether our very public pledge and all that came with it has done nothing more than drive a wedge between different groups of Blacks and separate us even more from the rest of America. I worry that EE should have been a little smarter and more sophisticated but wasn't because of something we did or didn't do, that these small but encouraging endeavors and partnerships will wither. That's a very discouraging little space to occupy.