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, âtell the swell story about the Negro.â4 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 bank president with the establishment of the St. Luke Penny Savings Bank in Richmond, Virginia.7 Black entrepreneurship began in 1651 when Anthony Johnson, formerly enslaved, purchased 250 acres of land in Virginia, and experienced enormous success as a tobacco farmer.8
Before the Emancipation Proclamation, free Blacks in the South and North had an insatiable appetite for business ownership, such that on the eve of the Civil War, their collective wealth was conservatively estimated to be over $50 million.9 Assuming an interest rate of 4% over 150 years, the present value of that $50 million would be approximately $15 billion! Among those Black entrepreneurs was James Forten, who, in the late 1700s, owned a manufacturing company in Philadelphia that made sails for ships.10 He employed more than 40 Black and White workers.
A recurring theme of Black entrepreneurship in the nineteenth century was job creation. In 1838, free Black women created jobs for themselves and others through their domination of the dress-making and wig-making industries. In 1840, free Blacks in New York also created jobs through their ownership of a clothes cleaner, a hairdressing salon, a confectionary, a fruit store, two coal yards, two dry goods stores, two restaurants, three tailor shops, and six boarding houses.
Surprisingly, Black entrepreneurship was not limited to free Blacks. While enslaved in the early 1800s, Frank McWorter started a company that produced saltpeter, the main ingredient in gun powder. With the company's profits, he purchased his freedom and the freedom of 16 family members. John Berry Meachum, among his several accomplishments, owned a carpentry busin...
