Blacks Should Support Black-Owned Businesses
Mostly everyone has heard of Chinatown, where the Chinese have set up their own places of residence and business. There’s also Koreatown, where Koreans have their own restaurants, banks and grocery stores. You could also drive through areas of Miami where the Jewish people have their synagogues, bookstores, banks and schools.
They are very serious about supporting their own businesses, keeping the money within their communities and making sure not just anyone comes and does business there. This ensures that their communities are protected and flourish.
Now let’s turn around to look at the inner cities. According to the Public Broadcasting Station’s website, “70 percent of blacks and latinos live in the cities or inner-ring suburbs.”
Although blacks populate inner cities, they hardly own any of the businesses or land there. Everyone is allowed to come in and out of the black community, throw trash in the streets, vandalize the buildings, do business and disrespect the women who live there.
If blacks want to see an economic change, we must come together to support black businesses and keep the dollar circulating within our community. This will this give us economic success and help us reach a better condition.
According to a recent study by the Nielsen Company, “African Americans will have $1.1 trillion in collective buying power by 2015 (increasing to about $1.3 trillion by 2017), making us [African Americans] ‘more relevant than ever’ as a consumer bloc,” as quoted by Clutch Magazine Online.
Even though $1.3 trillion is a lot of money, it could be quite hard to believe that such an amount of money comes from the black community considering the terrible condition of our neighborhoods.
That is because we are not using the money properly. Could you imagine if we did?
If we took our economic condition seriously, we would rise to a state of affluence. We would have several businesses, land ownership and our own residential property. How do I know this? Because it was done once before.
According to blackwallstreet.freeservers.com, Black Wall Street was the most affluent black community, located in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in the early 1900s. It spanned more than 36 square blocks that contained 600 businesses and a population of 15,000 blacks. These businesses consisted of banks, hospitals, movie theaters, restaurants, etc.
The dollar circulated within the community 36 to 100 times, sometimes taking an entire year to leave. Clutch Magazine Online reports that the dollar currently stays in the black community for only six hours.
Furthermore, some blacks in Black Wall Street had an income of $500 a day, a substantial amount in 1910. All of this was possible because blacks came together and supported their own businesses.
In 1921, Black Wall Street was tragically bombed during the Tulsa Race Riot, where a group of whites led a racially motivated mob into the community, killing hundreds of blacks.
If blacks were to come together to improve our economic condition and protect our communities, we would be a force to be reckoned with.
