Nahaz Rogers, a 68-year-old south sider, never eats at fast-food franchises.
“You might as well be back in slavery if you’re working to benefit white folks,” Rogers says. “You’re sharecropping if what you produce ends up with somebody else. And most blacks are sharecroppers. Blacks in Chicago go to Evergreen Plaza to shop. They go to Oak Brook. If they stay in the community, they buy from white stores. For groceries, they buy from Jewel or Dominick’s. For shoes, from Payless or Chandler’s or Chernin’s. But not me. I buy black, because that’s the only way we are going to become powerful.
Rogers is a consultant to the president of the Black Economic Network, a group formed just last year to bring about economic self-sufficiency by fostering black entrepreneurship and encouraging blacks to buy from blacks. The goal of black economic power is an old one, but it has yet to catch fire. Buying black, says Consuelo Pope, president of the predominantly black Cosmopolitan Chamber of Commerce, “has always been problematic with us.” Hurley Green, editor and publisher of the Chicago Independent Bulletin, says, “We just haven’t been motivated to think much of ourselves businesswise.” To succeed, say proponents of black economic empowerment, African American consumers must overcome many ingrained biases. “We have to change the whole mind-set of black folks,” says Rogers. “But I think maybe, at last, we’re on our way.”
“My father believed in Garvey’s message,” says Rogers, who was given an African tribal name to mark his father’s devotion to the movement. “My father said constantly that we as Negroes had to be about the business of uplifting our own people if we were ever to be equal.” Hosea spread that message in talks he gave around Chicago under the UNIA banner; he remained devoted to Garvey’s memory until he died 22 years ago.
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Garvey, who died in 1940, was disgraced after he was convicted of mail fraud in conjunction with the financial collapse of the Black Star Line. But his dream of economic nationalism was echoed in the views of other black leaders. In his final speech–delivered in Memphis on April 3, 1968, in support of a sanitation workers’ strike–Martin Luther King Jr. said, “I’ve been to the mountaintop.” Then he hinted that he might not live long. Had he survived, the speech might well be known for another passage, which called for black economic empowerment. King advised his listeners that if the city’s white power structure refused to deal fairly with the garbage workers, blacks should withhold their dollars from white-run companies. Don’t buy Coca-Cola in Memphis, he said. Don’t buy Wonder Bread. “As Jesse Jackson has said, up to now only the garbage men have been feeling the pain. Now we must redistribute the pain.” Put your money in the black-owned Tri-State Bank, he said. “You have six or seven black insurance companies in Memphis. Take your insurance there. We have to have an ‘insurance-in.’
While many African American leaders continued to pay lip service to the necessity of “buying black,” the real support for it waned with the 1970s. Operation PUSH, Breadbasket’s successor, continued to tout black businesses, yet it made its focus affirmative-action agreements, or covenants as they were later called, with white companies. Thirteen such covenants are now in effect, according to the Reverend George Riddick, the venerable Operation PUSH vice president who helped negotiate most of them. The covenants apply to corporations such as Chrysler, Ford, Miller Brewing, Coca-Cola, Kentucky Fried Chicken, and WBBM TV, and have benefited blacks and their firms by $2.8 billion, Riddick says.
The “ice is colder” metaphor is frequently used to explain African American shopping patterns. “From slavery we have been taught to be servants,” says Webb Evans, president of the United American Progress Association, a Chicago-based group that has been trying to foster black consumerism for 30 years. “We were taught to obey white people. Our churches taught us not to get involved in business. When we did, whites directed us toward cooking chitlins and running beauty- and barbershops. Hurley Green cracks, “We specialize in the three Bs–barbershops, beauty shops, and barbecue places.” (There are, of course, obvious exceptions. Johnson Publishing Company, Inc., with revenues of more than $200 million annually, is the second most profitable black business in the nation, according to Black Enterprise magazine. Seaway National Bank, with $150 million in assets, ranks as the top black financial institution in the nation; Independence Bank is fourth.)
