Our Black Year

AFTER THE BRIEF DAYS OF HOPE FOR FARMERS BEST, things again began looking grim, and my mood became prickly. Despite our prodding, friends were doing nothing to support Karriem’s store, even though they said they would shop there. They were just telling us what we wanted to hear.

During my frequent trips to Farmers Best there were hardly any cars in the parking lot near Karriem’s Ford Excursion. The entire shopping center’s lot took up two blocks, and because Farmers Best was by far the largest building in the strip mall, there were about six aisles of double-sided spaces available for his customers. The other stores had no more than half that amount. Keeping my spirits up after pulling into that lot was next to impossible. I knew that empty lot meant that the inside of the store was a dead zone.

Before walking in I’d take a few minutes, clear my head, and push back the tears. Then I’d inhale and force a smile. I knew how humiliating this plight was becoming for Karriem, and I was trying not to make it worse. I’d hop out of the car, grab a shopping cart, and stroll down the empty aisles, all the while sporting a pleasant smile that bordered on the insane. And I’d buy. Then I’d buy some more. I knew my belief that buying a couple extra cans of beans or six-packs of Gatorade was going to make a difference was pathetic.

“Stop, John,” I said. “You know exactly why I bought all that. At least I’m not wasting money. I’m only loading up on stuff that can sit for a while and that we’re gonna use eventually.”

“Sweetie, you can rent a U-Haul truck and fill it up. Ain’t gonna make a difference. You can’t fix it because you are not the problem. The problem is not us. You gotta stop blaming yourself.”

“Karriem’s a grown man. He already appreciates us. He’s facing a lot right now. But we’re not his problem. The rest of them not bringing their lazy behinds into that store . . . they’re his problem.”

By this time I’d gotten into somewhat of a routine. As soon as I dropped the girls at day care in the morning, the doors of The Empowerment Experiment opened. I’d check and send e-mails, tally up recent receipts, and then call KB, whether or not I was making the trek to the store. When he needed to discuss the business with someone who cared and was not too busy with a day job, he’d call. And he needed to discuss the business all the time. Having a chat at around 8:30 in the morning became standard for us.

“Maggie, you are not listening,” he told me one particular morning. “It’s not that I couldn’t afford the meat—it’s that I couldn’t afford a price hike. It would’ve killed us.”

“Can he? Can he? He did. What can’t he do? Those Italians own the whole strip over there. They have contracts with Certified Grocers. I’m just me. I’m no one. Just Karriem.”

“Maggie, it’s not that. It’s us. I need more traffic. I agreed on a price with this guy based on my ordering twice a week. I’ve been ordering twice a month, if that, because I don’t have enough customers or money to justify those orders. So now he says he has to up my price. And I still gotta deal with these idiots at the Link office.”

Link machines, the devices in stores that process the state’s debit cards for customers receiving food subsidies—what used to be known as food stamps—were notorious for breaking down. Karriem’s was as temperamental as the worst.

I knew I talked too much, but I was always trying to give him hope, a new solution he might not have considered when sometimes all he wanted was to vent. Karriem’s struggles did seem to mirror our own, but at least we’d get a break every now and then—a major piece in print or TV interview, a donation to the foundation, a call from an influential business leader offering support. For some reason he was not getting any of those. I felt responsible for him barely being able to stay afloat.

As the Fourth of July approached, we were hoping for a miracle, or at least enough of a boost to keep Farmers Best open for another couple weeks. There was one reason in particular why we were optimistic: the first of the month—three days before the holiday, in this case—is one of the monthly occasions when the government refills Link accounts. The sorry fact is that those are always busy days for food stores in poor areas, which often means African American neighborhoods. Add to that the spike in grocery shopping that occurs before the Fourth, and we were fairly confident the store would be buzzing with customers. Karriem flooded the radio with commercials that week. He grilled in the parking lot again. He offered tempting sales and specials.

When the Link machine breaks at a particular establishment, those cardholders go elsewhere. And if you’re running a business teetering on the brink of insolvency, say, like a certain brave African American grocer on the South Side of Chicago, an untimely Link machine breakdown can shove you over the cliff.

On the morning of June 29, the day after my birthday, I speed-dialed Karriem’s cell as I drove to the store to make sure he would be in when I got there. I had a bunch of shopping to do. The Fourth of July was around the corner, and Cara’s birthday is four days after that. Then there was my best friend’s bachelorette party that I was hosting later that week.

“No, no, sweetie,” he said. His voice sounded so defeated. “Everyone’s okay. I just don’t have everything. I couldn’t make my orders and I told everyone to stay home. I don’t want you to see the store like this.” He explained that he did not have the funds to pay for his meat and frozen food orders. His suppliers would not let him pay on credit, so they would not deliver, and Karriem could not replenish his stock.

I hung up. Saying it was too painful for him, but I knew what had happened: He’d closed. It was over. How in the hell could we have let that happen? I pulled over. It was too much. I shut my eyes and shook my head. Then I pressed down on the accelerator and headed for the store. I had to see what was going on.

As I drove those fourteen miles through some of the most desirable and most forlorn neighborhoods in America, I kept replaying the events of the past few weeks. The brisk traffic at the store that we’d worked so hard to create had dissolved. Many folks who came for the promotions would buy only the items advertised or just redeem the $5-off coupons. Some showed up for the barbecues but never stepped foot inside the store. Or they came once and never returned.

“Mag, I can’t keep throwing money into a black hole,” he said. He looked drained, resigned. “I have to close down. I’m ordering some of those ‘Going Out Of Business Sale’ signs, and I hope they’ll clean me out. At least I won’t have to throw away my inventory.”

“You? Did something to me? KB, you are the project. I’m the failure, not you. Remember all that crap I told you about all those folks I’m going to bring in here? That you weren’t going to be able to handle all the customers? Remember all that? Dammit, Karriem! Don’t you see that we failed you and not the other way around?”

“Yeah, I remember,” he said, laughing ruefully. “You said we were going to have a ribbon-cutting ceremony for my second location as the EE Victory Party. That there was gonna be a flood. Black customers from Oak Park, Bolingbrook, South Shore, Harvey flooding into the store. Big flood! Yeah, I remember.”

I looked at that beautiful, empty store and was disgusted with myself. Then I started blubbering, and this time, a full-fledged weeping-Maggie avalanche erupted. John and I told Karriem we would change the world—one entrepreneur, one business, and one community at a time—starting with him, his store, and this community. The premise was simple and straightforward: Black entrepreneurs hire Black people and the dismal Black unemployment rate starts to drop. The neighborhood improves. People see what’s happening in that store and other establishments take root and grow. Momentum builds from the sidewalk up. That was EE’s promise—our promise to Karriem. I made him believe everything we’d told him. I poisoned him, his store, and his dream with our hopes and naiveté. I misled and let down this honorable man.

I ended up shopping that day anyway in a nearly dark store. I felt like I was grocery shopping after a nuclear apocalypse, as if I was rummaging through the lone food store on earth.

Karriem did order the signs, and he let everyone go except two employees he needed to help break down shelves, coolers, and other equipment to liquidate assets as part of the bankruptcy. In those few weeks after he closed I stocked up on whatever I could store in my house and whatever I could give to John’s brother and sister-in-law. Karriem would bring cartons of dry goods like chips, pasta, condiments, peanut butter, soda, and beans. It got to the point where he was stopping by almost every day on the way to his home, just to bring over some of the inventory he could not liquidate.

And the produce! We gave away cases of mangoes, oranges, and pineapples to family and friends. We spent an entire weekend peeling, cutting, bagging, freezing, and juicing. We had fruit smoothies for weeks. We tried to make the most of a depressing situation.

What was most agonizing about Karriem’s closing was the realization that no one but Black folks was to blame—Not ’da man, not ’da gub-ment . Us—the customer base that should have flocked to his place was apathetic, cynical, and otherwise missing in action. How much effort we as a people invest in denying the possibility of a successful Black-owned grocer was amazing.

My encounter with a lady in the store’s parking lot was typical. One summer afternoon prior to the store’s closing a pretty woman wearing a sundress and floppy hat approached me. She was holding a bag from the dollar store next to Farmers Best.

I couldn’t believe it. Although I wanted to scream at her, I took a breath and launched into the details about Farmers Best and EE—our pledge, the businesses, Northwestern’s study. She listened to all of it and then, in a staggering display of ignorance, said, “I’m not giving them crackuhs a dime of my money.”

Sometimes I wonder whether something in our DNA prevents us from working together, whether the cultural liabilities we’ve experienced and, yes, cultivated over the decades have become the essence of who we are.

One of my favorite examples is the bullshit hoax of glorifying the ghetto. We love to do that—to boast about “keeping it real.” It makes me roll my eyes and want to stick a finger down my throat. The truth—and we all know it—is that ignorant perspectives like the hollow “keeping it real” refrain guarantee that our neighborhoods will stay chaotic, impoverished, dilapidated, violent, and hopeless. But those neighborhoods are ours, baby. They’re all ours, glory hallelujah, and as long they’re ours, we’ve got something. Da hood is ugly, broke down, and scary, but it’s all mine! Now isn’t that something to crow about? If it weren’t so painful and embarrassing, it’d be funny. Well, here’s something else to consider: We never talk about why it’s ours. Pretty simple, really: The ghetto is ours because no one else wants it. Who would?

Then there’s the ridiculous line of thought used to justify our complacency—a forced, slightly twisted logic that links our inertia with our spirituality. You know the phrases: “Blessed be the meek” and “The more we suffer here, the greater our reward in heaven.”

In her book Talking Dollars and Making Sense: A Wealth Building Guide for African-Americans, Wall Street veteran Brooke Stephens comments, “From the days of slavery, African-Americans have bought into this bizarre fallacy that there was something noble about poverty and suffering, and that the only comfort we should expect will be in an afterlife.” In other words, be proud to be poor. We are not supposed to prosper: Our honor is in our exploitation and suffering.

Really? So why didn’t Rosa just stay in the back of the bus and suffer proudly? Why didn’t our mothers and fathers in Selma quit at the Edmund Pettus Bridge? You know why? Because they understood that the time to act had come. They knew they had been denied basic human rights for too long and that the only course to take was to dig in their heels and say, Enough. No more will we take this humiliation and denial. We must stand—whether it’s claiming a place on the bus or marching to guarantee safe entry into the voting booth—and seize our God-given rights.

Since then things have gotten a little complicated. We’ve allowed ourselves to compromise. We’ve been seduced—maybe sedated is a better word—and we’ve lost focus. The humiliation endures, but it’s more nuanced, more insidious, and the big difference is we’ve perpetrated it. We’ve betrayed ourselves and then directed our bitterness at everyone else. Time to take ownership, folks. Time to take action—again.

I also hear this crap about “them”—White America—stepping on us because they want to be us. We get all righteous about how they exploit us and condemn us but never will be able to be us. Let them have all the prosperity and power, this ludicrous riff goes. They can’t take our soul. We’ve got our soul power! Translation: You’re lazy and don’t care anymore. You don’t believe we can make things better, and you’ve found a way to contort that into some kind of warped pride—the triumph of failure. How whacked out is that?

“To go on blaming society, the white man, recent immigrants, Congress, the ‘establishment’ for one’s lack of prosperity is good for venting one’s frustration,” Stephens writes, “but what are you going to do about the situation once you get past the talking stage?” This line of thought is just “another category of Black paranoia and a set of excuses not to make any effort to change and stop being a willing victim,” she continues. “Our ancestors bought and paid for our success—it is time to claim it as being long past due.”

Fear—not all that different from the fear in the White community and fear among Prominent Black Folks—is a powerful, hope-killing force in the African American psyche. “The bottom line is that most Black folks are scared to talk about money,” Stephens notes. “Scared to admit they’ve made dumb choices with it. Scared to take risks as entrepreneurs. Scared to trust and respect each other as professionals in business deals.... Scared to challenge outdated beliefs about prosperity and economic well-being. Scared to stop blaming racism for all the financial problems that exist in the Black community.”

Stephens’ words made me think about all the Prominent Black Folks who took a pass on supporting EE. Were they afraid of taking a bold step that somehow might offend Whites? Were they cynics who believed that most Blacks were incapable of running successful businesses? Regardless, their sense that their position is precarious seems to motivate their behavior. Dr. Walker told me, “I have found that the most wealthy and most prominent blacks achieved their wealth and power by placing themselves in the mainstream of American life and, for the most part will stay away from anything that can be considered racially divisive.” They flourish as long as they succeed in treading lightly—acknowledging they’re Black but not so Black that they jeopardize business relationships with well-heeled Whites.

By way of example, Walker pointed to the rushed firing in 2010 of US Department of Agriculture employee Shirley Sherrod, an African American woman whose out-of-context remarks at a speech twenty years ago depicted her as unfairly dealing with a White farmer. The Obama administration couldn’t get rid of her fast enough, but then they were embarrassed when the media revealed that, in fact, Sherrod had treated the man with dignity, had actually helped save the man’s farm, and had become friends with him.

According to Clarence Jones, no empirical data exist to show that the Black power-elite is lagging in its support of impoverished Blacks, but he thought that this lack of support might exist, and it might be generational.

“My gut feeling, strangely enough,” he said, “is that . . . except for Bill Cosby and Oprah—I don’t think [it is] on [the older Black elite’s] radar. I really think that the predominant mindset is that ‘I did it so anybody can do it.’ And . . . there may be a sense of not wanting to put what they have at risk.”

However, according to Jones, the new generation of African American sports personalities “really have a sense that, ‘I want to give something back.’ They feel much more of a connection and they’re more proud from whence they came. In many ways, they’re much more secure in what they’ve acquired than some of the older ones.”

With all due respect to Clarence Jones, given our experience I believe that part of the reason Black people can never earn their rightful place in society is because we do not support each other. This failure does not have to do with our history in this country, racism, or discrimination. This failure is about whom we have chosen to be.

I had a strong sense about all this before embarking on The Empowerment Experiment, but I refused to acknowledge it. Once we got rolling I wanted to believe that the desire to empower ourselves was latent but strong in all of us. If we just had a spark to ignite it, we could overcome our ingrained, destructive history. Maybe our belief was a survival tactic. Or chalk it up to our guilelessness. Or maybe I just didn’t think that the defeatism would be so intractable that it could kill Karriem’s store.

What made it worse, if that’s possible, was reflecting on all the empty promises people—Prominent Black Folks and not so prominent—made to us regarding their support of Farmers Best. I call it the “art of civilized hypocrisy.” Basically, folks were lying to our faces, especially people in Bronzeville and Hyde Park, vibrant neighborhoods with substantial Black populations near Karriem’s store. People there had no excuse to bypass the place except for the obvious reason: racism among our own people, against our own people.

“Not enough support,” I’d say, trying to stop the burning between my ears. After a while I stopped being polite and let them have it, which is what happened with a congregant of Trinity United Church of Christ who made the mistake of asking me about the project after she recognized me from the CBS Early Show interview. When she suggested that I ask Pastor Moss to include Farmers Best coupons in the church bulletin, I told her it was too late: The store was closed. She reacted the way everyone else did—with surprise.

“It’s your fault,” I told her, “and everybody else in this church’s fault who didn’t have the simple decency to empower one of our own brothers by doing nothing more than shopping at his beautiful store once in a while.”

Poor woman never knew what hit her. But I had all these other thoughts—questions, really—about what went wrong for Farmers Best. Why would folks like this seemingly well-intentioned woman never, ever wake up on a Sunday morning and drive a few blocks to Farmers Best but instead drive eight miles to the closest Whole Foods or Target Greatland? Why do we spend our hard-earned money in those disgusting neighborhood minimarts, owned by people who live in prosperous suburbs with high-performing schools and who treat us, their customers, with contempt while offering overpriced, inferior goods? Why are we so willing to help send their kids to college instead of supporting someone like Karriem, a caring, committed, hardworking role model who provides a wonderful store employing and mentoring at-risk Black youth?

After our Black year ended, the Chicago Tribune ran a second article reflecting on what had transpired, including the closing of Farmers Best. Karriem publicly pointed to the rough economy, deep-pocketed and not always upright competitors, and the unavailability of capital—there it is again—as the culprits. His love for us and his appreciation for our efforts on his behalf were strong, which was noble of him. However, his feelings for The Empowerment Experiment and the notion of Blacks supporting Black-owned businesses were ambivalent. Grudgingly, he acknowledged that the lack of community support was a factor in shutting him down.

He said, “The Empowerment Experiment . . . made people aware of the lack of support for Black-owned businesses and aware that there was a Black-owned fresh market. What people chose to do with that remains to be seen.”

What happened to Karriem still keeps me up at night. The whole episode highlights one of the most enduring problems of this odyssey: I was enraged at the people I wanted to empower. I hated the people I wanted to help the most. That love-hate dynamic made me want to slap or spit on somebody, to burn something to the ground—and this lasted a long, long time. When it finally started to dissipate, it morphed into cynicism, which is debilitating when you’re trying to sustain a movement and instill hope.

I almost felt as if Karriem’s closing, the PBFs’ rejection, and the overall Black divisiveness were signs from God that we were not meant to win this fight. I came to this bizarre conclusion that we Blacks suffer from a paralyzing psychosis brought on by a cancer, and that cancer is not the leakage, nor is the racism or the exploitation at the hands of other ethnic groups who had raided our neighborhoods and industries. We were the cancer. We were sick, poisoned, dying, and choosing to ignore the symptoms.

I learned that it was going to take a lot more than a fantastic store and a dynamic entrepreneur to shake my peoples’ paralysis, to cure the cancer. And I couldn’t stop myself from coming to another conclusion: Farmers Best was everything EE could be and everything we in the Black community would never be.

Although the Farmer’s Best closing knocked us on our rear ends, we were getting signals that we had at least piqued people’s interest. The e-mails, T-shirt orders, and registrations kept coming—between the website and the Facebook group, about eight thousand official EE members by August—and so did speaking requests. We received awards from or invitations to partner with several key organizations—from the United American Progress Association, a grassroots organization based on Chicago’s South Side, to the NAACP, National Urban League, and National Black Chamber of Commerce.

Throughout this time we were reevaluating our media strategy, which had been focused on getting as much national, mainstream media exposure as possible, sometimes at the expense of neglecting smaller Black outlets. Our PR firm had to focus on paying clients, and it was not doing much in terms of promoting our story. So other media’s coverage triggered most of the media we got, and that made us think we may have been spending too much time explaining and defending instead of sharing and inspiring. Educating outsiders who wanted to understand the issues was important, but we wanted to spark real change, and nothing was going to change unless Black people were inspired to act. The result was that we altered our media strategy: We would focus our efforts on predominantly Black outlets.

We crossed paths a few weeks after my June speech at Friendship-West Church, when I attended the National Urban League Conference in Chicago. Apart from being a radio giant, Banks is an author and public speaker, though he is definitely not your typical talking head. He presents a full-bodied, nuanced portrayal of the issues and believes in intelligent conversation—as much as can be achieved on a radio call-in show, anyway. In other words, he’s smart, articulate, and takes seriously his role as cohost of the nationally syndicated radio show, The Ride with Doug and Dede. Because of all that, people view him as a leader in our community.

When I told him about The Empowerment Experiment, I could almost see the wheels clicking. That happened with lots of people. And, like lots of people, he said he supported the project 100 percent. What made Doug different was that he immediately took action, inviting us to be on the show, which airs in the all-important 2–6 p.m. weekday time slot. We set it up for August 18, a Tuesday. John and I were ecstatic. Every day on the show Doug submits a topic for discussion on “The Adult Conversation,” and folks call in. We thought Doug and Dede would interview us for the standard few minutes, which is what happened with most of our other media appearances. Instead, they called us at home and kept us on the show for an unprecedented three hours. The topic was “Should Black People Do More to Support Black Businesses?”

While John and I passed a phone back and forth between us (there was better reception if we didn’t use separate receivers), we were subjected to an audio lashing. Only one caller supported self-help economics and pledged to do more to spend his money at local, Black businesses. The rest tore apart the ideals behind our mission, usually by recounting a story about a disappointing experience at a Black business and then swearing off ever patronizing one again.

Someone said they were cheated at a Black-owned business; another claimed the customers at the establishment scared her; a third said the owners did. A caller complained that the Black-owned stores didn’t look like Wal-Mart. “Bottom line,” another critic pronounced, “is that Black businesses are always dirty, and the prices are too high. Black people are just greedy.”

And then there was my all-time favorite: The Black folks who want credit for trying to buy Black once, ten years ago, and having an unsatisfactory experience, which leads them to dismiss the entire race as being incompetent business people. This old saw invariably triggers one of my loud, crazy-lady laughs.

We’d gotten some of these reactions before, of course, so we were prepared with data about leakage, stories about encounters with high-quality, Black-owned businesses, and our suggestion to support only reputable Black businesses as a way to lower unemployment, strengthen the tax base, improve schools, and provide good role models. We told the onetime buy-Black shoppers to keep trying, that even Sam Walton started as a small-time retailer who needed customers from the community.

I remember asking the Popeye’s caller whether he knew if the place was really Black-owned. “I bet you it’s not,” I said. “Have you ever considered who the owner is and what kind of service and quality he’d deliver to a Popeye’s in one of those nicer neighborhoods on the North Side?”

To another skeptic I said, “But doesn’t it bother you that all your hard-earned money is sending everyone else’s kids to college, and our kids are the least educated and most likely to go to jail?”

Doug and Dede kept up the same approach, trying to steer the conversation back to the bigger issues, but the critical calls kept flowing. We were back in the quicksand and sinking fast.

We finished “The Adult Conversation” feeling like we’d been shoved onto the sidewalk after being roughed up in an alley for three hours. That beating reinforced another lesson: the myth that “The Black Community” is a monolithic, unified culture moving to the same beat, almost like a single-minded church parish. The cult of Black—we all still vote Democratic, right? But what surprised me was just how divisive we could be. Has it gotten this bad? Do Black folks hate each other that much? Are we that narrow-minded and ignorant?

Maybe The Empowerment Experiment was doomed to fail. On the one hand, we had angry Whites calling us racist, and on the other, we had Blacks tearing into us for a number of reasons, saying we were ignorant for believing that Black-owned businesses were competitive with White-owned ones—or could ever be. It was our own Perfect Storm.

In my despair I reached out to Dr. Juliet Walker, who, as the only female member of our Executive Advisory Team, had become a mother figure to me. She said Black divisiveness must be viewed in the context of what is known as “crabs in the bucket” or “crabs in a barrel.” The story is that Booker T. Washington formally coined the phrase and used it in one of his lectures to point out how Blacks were holding each other back. Picture a bucket of crabs. None of the crustaceans will allow the others to climb out. Any time a single crab attempts to get out, the rest pull the lone crab back down. This was one of the theories we were trying to examine in The Empowerment Experiment.

Booker T. may have coined it, but the phrase, used most often to describe the plight of our businesses, has been around for about as long as Africans have been Americans. Lately, Black folks have used it—mistakenly, I believe—in reference to commentators and intellectuals, like Tavis Smiley and Cornel West, who publicly criticize President Obama. It’s not that Smiley and West expect to be president, the misguided thinking goes; instead, it’s that President Obama was making it out of the bucket, so they will attack the president, pulling him back in because he is Black and successful and that bothers them, and doing so benefits them personally in the form of more listeners, viewers, and readers.

You see it in other cultures too: Hawaiians call it Alamihi Crab Syndrome, the Swedes and Scandinavians know it as Jante’s law, and in Australia and New Zealand it goes by Tall Poppy Syndrome. I even found a reference to it in a 2006 International Monetary Fund essay on why poor countries stay that way: “Citizens, fearing that the advantage gained by one group may come at the expense . . . of the other, become like crabs in a bucket, preventing each other from getting out,” writes Raghuram Rajan, director of the IMF’s Research Department. “Uncertainty about who will get the benefits of reforms can further compound resistance.”

Others have remarked on the by-products of this syndrome. In Talking Dollars and Making Sense, Stephens writes, “African-Americans have such a strong historical identity with poverty that we seem to define ourselves by what we don’t have rather than what we do have.... If and when a brother or sister finds a way to create a profitable life, that person is immediately looked upon with suspicion and condemned as having ‘sold out.’”

That identity with poverty leads to laziness and, in Stephens’s view, “is a self-fulfilling prophecy.” People think, “The few dollars I make don’t mean anything, and I’ll never have anything, so why try?”

Complicating matters is the fact that White efforts to derail Black economic empowerment have existed for about as long as “crabs in a barrel.” Laws to discourage Black entrepreneurship were established “almost as soon as the first settlers came to America,” according to Jessie Carney Smith, editor of the Encyclopedia of African American Business. “From the end of the Civil War to the modern civil rights era, whites drove blacks out of their trades.”

So Blacks found other ways to survive, most notably the aforementioned fraternal societies that became banking and insurance companies as well as businesses like shoemakers, draymen, and liverymen that Whites were reluctant to enter.

But the Black community remained fragmented. Some of this divisiveness, Dr. Walker told me, is borne of hopelessness, which was a product of all that formal opposition and something else: the horrifying widespread practice of lynching.

“It should be mentioned,” she pointed out, “that during the age of massive lynching of Blacks—according to the findings of Ida B. Wells—the largest number of Black men lynched were those businesspeople who competed with Whites”—not those facing the already highly suspicious charges of raping White women.

That wasn’t only Ida B. Wells’s conclusion. In a landmark 1931 report, two prominent sociologists—one White, one Black—studied thousands of lynchings in the South and refuted the impression that these horrific crimes were meant as punishment for those dubious allegations of rape. In fact, fewer than 20 percent of all lynchings stemmed from rape or similar charges; many were attempts by largely rural, poor Whites to fend off what they saw as economic and political competition from their poorer Black neighbors. In my research I found repeated references to an estimated two or three lynchings each week in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the South, and every reference listed economic competition from Blacks as a leading reason for the crime. Lynching was economic terrorism.

White violence against Black economic empowerment didn’t end with lynchings. Look through enough African American history and you can find all sorts of violence perpetrated against successful Black businesses. In 1859 Black furniture maker Henry Boyd, considered the most successful African American manufacturer before the Civil War, closed his Cincinnati plant after it had been burned three times. In 1860 arsonists destroyed the elegant Sea Girt Hotel in Newport, Rhode Island, owned by African American hotelier and civic leader George Thomas Downing. The 1906 race riot in Atlanta, in which at least twenty-five Blacks were killed, and the 1919 race riots in Chicago, where twenty-three Blacks were killed, were directly traced to White tension over economic competition from Blacks.

I’ve never been one of those people who blame everything on slavery and the especially harsh realities for Blacks through the late-nineteenth century; I do believe, especially now, that hundreds of years of slavery, slaughter, open and covert hostility, and various forms of exploitation have plenty to do with it. In any case, the result is that Blacks now have very few businesses, and most of them are concentrated in a few markets and industries—like hair braiding—and in a few locales—in poorer, predominantly Black neighborhoods. This would not be so catastrophic if those businesses were successful, expanding, employing more than one or two people, and dominating lucrative industries. You know where that’s happening? Among Koreans, who have taken over the Black hair and beauty supply industry, which generates over $9 billion a year.

To make matters worse, only a small percentage of the Black-owned businesses that do exist are high quality and competitive. That condition perpetuates a debilitating cycle, Dr. Walker notes. Most Black businesses don’t survive, and those that do survive can’t generate enough money to expand, which often leads to their eventual demise. That environment plays into the cynicism, suspicion, and divisiveness among our own people.

Clarence Jones, the scholar in residence at Stanford’s Martin Luther King Jr. Institute, told me that African American disagreement over buying Black is a result of the struggle for civil rights, a desire “to be considered and treated as part of the mainstream.... They don’t want to be reminded of the economic disparities. They mistakenly don’t see Black empowerment as a positive step. They see that as somehow a denigration and denial of their status as ‘equal’ in this society and they, too, are living an illusion.”

As Jones pointed out, slavery exacted an incalculable psychological toll on Blacks, and segregation “scarred our psyche.” The overall consequence—apart from the lack of intergenerational wealth—was a lasting sense of lower social status.

“They should see [buying Black] as an act of pride,” Jones said, “as a validation of their self-worth, but some of them don’t see it that way.” And so they resist. “That resistance must be challenged . . . in a sympathetic way,” he cautioned, “because you are dealing with a Black people who are inflicted with their own sense of inferiority.”