Successful Black Entrepreneurs

1History of Black Entrepreneurship

IN A SINGLE word, entrepreneurship has meant freedom to the Black community. Freedom to command their own destinies, to serve their own communities, to live out their own dreams through entrepreneurship, and the freedom to free enslaved people. However, to be clear, Black entrepreneurship did not begin in 2019 when Kim and Jim Lewis, founders of CurlMix Inc., pitched their company on Shark Tank and rejected a $400,000 offer.¹ It also did not begin in 1991 when Bob Johnson, the founder of Black Entertainment Television (BET), took the company public, raising $72 million and becoming the first Black-owned company on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE).² Nor did it begin in 1969, when Parks Sausage Company became the first Black-owned company to complete an initial public offering.³ It did not begin in 1942 when John H. Johnson started the Negro Digest, which later became Ebony magazine, to, in his words, “tell the swell story about the Negro.”⁴ Nor did it begin in 1910 when Sarah Breedlove Walker, who we all know as Madam C. J. Walker, built a hair care manufacturing plant with over 3,000 employees in Indianapolis and became the country's first Black millionaire.⁵ It did not begin in 1905 when Robert Abbott began the Chicago Defender newspaper, a major publication of the Black press, which grew to be one of the most influential national newspapers of the time.⁶ Finally, it did not begin in 1903 when Maggie Walker became the country's first female ...