Celebrating Black History: Intentionally support Black businesses
By Dr. Anne T. Sulton, Esq.
JA Senior International Correspondent
Black History celebrations are held throughout the USA, particularly during January (Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Birthday), February (Black History Month), June (Juneteenth), and December (Kwanzaa).
Among the other nations celebrating a Black History Month are Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland, the Netherlands, and Germany. Some countries celebrate in February, others in October.
Each year in the USA, the Black History Month theme is announced by the Association for the Study of African American Life and History. This year’s theme is “African Americans and Labor”. The Association explains the theme “focuses on the various and profound ways that work and working of all kinds – free and unfree, skilled, and unskilled, vocational and voluntary – intersect with the collective experiences of Black people.”
The U.S. Census Bureau estimates the USA’s Black population currently is almost 49 million.
The Pew Research Center, a trusted nonpartisan source since the 1990s for reliable demographic and other social science data, states: “The Black population of the United States is growing. In 2023, an estimated 48.3 million people self-identified as Black, making up 14.4% of the country’s population. This marks a 33% increase since 2000, when there were 36.2 million Black people living in the U.S.”
The U.S. Small Business Administration reports that in 2019 nearly 3.5 million Black owned businesses employed an estimated 1.2 million people. Apparently, most Black owned businesses are small and employ only the owner. However, these Black owned businesses provide jobs for about 4.7 million people and enjoy annually sales exceeding $200 billion.
According to the Pew Research Center, Black owned companies increased the number of employees they hire and “provided income for roughly 1.4 million workers in 2021. Their annual payrolls were estimated at $53.6 billion.” It reports Black businesses provide a wide variety of goods and services in many sectors of the labor market, including but not limited to professional, scientific, technical, administrative, transportation, warehousing, retail, and construction.
Apparently not included in these labor market reports are the tens of thousands of jobs provided by the nearly 100 historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs). HBCUs, like all institutions of higher education, are businesses playing an enormously important role in the USA labor market.
HBCUs graduate nearly 50,000 students annually, many of whom go on to start their own businesses. According to the Pew Research Center, more than 25% of Black business owners are college educated.
The United Negro College Fund reports: “The success of HBCUs is good news for all of us. The total annual economic impact of HBCU spending in the United States is $14.8 billion; the equivalent to a ranking in the top 200 corporations on the Fortune 500 list. HBCUs also annually generate roughly 134,000 jobs nationwide for their local and regional economies.”
Black owned businesses provide jobs for millions of Black people, and generate annually hundreds of billions of dollars in sales. Because most Blacks in the USA work force are employed by non-Black owned businesses, where these employees choose to spend their paychecks is of utmost importance.
More than 40 percent of all Black households earn $75,000 each year. Twenty-five percent of all Black households earn more than $100,000 each year.
Marshalling existing financial resources already within the Black community, whether generated by Black owned businesses or through employment with non-Black owned entities, and intentionally spending dollars with Black owned businesses, likely will increase the number of Black owned businesses and the number of people they are able to employ.
