In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

African American Entrepreneurship at the National Level 1 chapter one African American Entrepreneurship at the National Level Since the 1970s, there has been a tremendous increase in the number of African Americans who are interested in entrepreneurial activities.1 This interest includes an increasing sense of urgency on the part of African Americans to master the “art ofentrepreneurship.”Theywanttodoitwell.InMarch2000,Imadeapresentation aboutimportantbusinessissuesandtrendsfornortheastOhiothatemanatedfrom my research to the Greater Cleveland Minority Technology Council. During the presentation, I used various charts and graphs to explain my research design, my overall approach, and specific implications of my work. About halfway through the presentation, one of the black entrepreneurs in the audience raised his hand and indicated that he was especially interested in knowing what factors lead to success and failure. He asked, “What is the bottom line?” This question was important because getting to the heart of the matter, or the bottom line, is the major purpose of my work. As I have stated elsewhere, “A study that examines the variables which enhance the long-term survival of African American businesses is particularly germane at this point in time because during the past few decades, the number of businesses which are owned and operated by African Americans has proliferated to a large degree. The increase in the number of African Americans who are now ‘self-employed’ is attributable to the fact that economic development is seen by an increasingly larger number of African Americans as a viable and practical avenue for long-term economic survival.”2 Toward that end, numerous conferences and economic development summits have been held through the years to examine the economic conditionalities of African American people.3 My own study emerges at a time when there is a need and interest on the part of African Americans to master what the Reverend Jesse Jackson refers to as the final frontier, the economic sphere. His Rainbow/PUSH Coalition Wall Street Project, launched on the birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1997, has been instrumental in calling national attention to the needs of America’s own underserved market, which he argues “contains more than sixty million people, about 25 percent of the American population” and “commands 1 2 confronting the odds more than $600 billion in annual earnings.”4 This means that, when it is compared to the major economies of the world, it ranks fifteenth. This emerging market consists of the minority population of the United States, which is largely African American, Latino, and urban.5 Economic development and self-reliance have long preoccupied African Americans. Yet, the African American community has fallen far short in achieving its goal of attaining genuine self-sufficiency and wealth creation for the long term. The tremendous gains for African Americans in politics since the sixties are not matched in the economic arena.6 As Melvin Oliver and Thomas Shapiro remind us, Full equality, however, is still far from being achieved. Alongside the evidence of advancement in some areas and the concerted political mobilization for civil rights, the past two decades also saw an economic degeneration for millions of blacks, and this constitutes the crux of a troubling dilemma. Poor education, high joblessness, low incomes, and the subsequent hardships of poverty, family and community instability, and welfare dependency plague many African Americans. Most evident is the continuing large economic gap between blacks and whites. . . . Since the early 1970s, the economic status of blacks compared to that of whites has, on average, stagnated or deteriorated.7 More recent information from the Census Bureau indicates that the racial divide is not diminishing. Family inequality between blacks and whites is still high. In 1999, the median income of African American homes was $27,900, while the figure for whites was $44,400.8 In 2007, the median weekly income for black female workers was $540 which was only 69 percent of the earnings generated by white men. The median income for full-time black male workers was $585 per week, compared to $783 for white male workers.9 A growing body of data suggests that the economic position of the black family is still more a function of current income than it is of wealth accumulation over time, which is a better long-term barometer of a person’s economic well-being. As Oliver and Shapiro have suggested, Middle-class blacks, for example, earn seventy cents for every dollar earned by middle-class whites but they possess only fifteen cents for every dollar of wealth held by...

Share