The history of Black Business Month can be traced back to the year 2004, when engineering entrepreneur Frederick E. Jordan partnered with the president and executive editor of the scholarly publishing company eAccess Corp,\u2019 John William Templeton, to start this annual event. The intention of the pair was to \u201cdrive the policy agenda affecting the 2.6 million African-American businesses,\u201d in order to highlight and empower Black business owners all over, especially given the unique challenges faced by minority business owners. This stemmed from Jordan\u2019s own personal experience of the struggle to gain financial backing and funding when he began his own firm in San Francisco in 1969.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Today, he is the successful owner of F. E. Jordan Associates Inc., a company that has international reach, but it also led him to realize that the odds are still not in favor of Black entrepreneurship. To push for equity in the business spaces and to celebrate those who are thriving despite the challenges, Black Business Month is a month-long celebration of entrepreneurs who beat the odds.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Since the late 1700s, both free and enslaved Black people began to open their own small businesses, from barbershops to tobacco shops and shoemaking. As emancipation grew, so did the establishment of Black-owned businesses, and this led to the period between 1900 \u2014 1930 being labeled as the \u2018golden age\u2019 of Black-owned businesses. Segregation saw entire districts becoming Black-owned, such as Black Wall Street in Tulsa, Oklahoma.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In 1915, with the establishment of The National Negro Business League, there was widespread support of African-American entrepreneurship, with The National Business League spreading to over 34 states. By 2002, 1.2 million of the United States\u2019 23 million businesses were owned by Black people, bringing in a revenue of over $150 billion! How\u2019s that for booming business?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
HISTORY OF BLACK BUSINESS MONTH The history of Black Business Month can be traced back to the year 2004, when engineering entrepreneur Frederick E. Jordan partnered with the president and executive editor of the scholarly publishing company eAccess Corp,\u2019 John William Templeton, to start this annual event. The intention of the pair was to \u201cdrive…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":10200,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10197","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-business-networking","wpcat-25-id"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blacksuppliers.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10197","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blacksuppliers.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blacksuppliers.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blacksuppliers.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blacksuppliers.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10197"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.blacksuppliers.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10197\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10198,"href":"https:\/\/www.blacksuppliers.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10197\/revisions\/10198"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blacksuppliers.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/10200"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blacksuppliers.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10197"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blacksuppliers.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10197"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blacksuppliers.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10197"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}