Our Black Year by Maggie Anderson Read Free Book Online

for North America and Mexico—the first African American to run that unit, which was the company’s largest. He left to become an entrepreneur, establishing and then selling his own milk distribution company. Then he opened Farmers Best Market in June 2008. It is a place that promotes healthy lifestyles through sound diets, which includes quality produce. It also has forty minority employees, many of whom lived nearby. That cute bagger we met on our first visit? He was Karriem’s son.
    All that made Karriem courageous enough, but as we got to know him better, we found that he had an even wider vision. He created and ran a Chicago Public Schools program that gives tours of the international wholesale food market in Chicago where he bought produce. His idea was to inspire “at-risk youth”—the generic phrase for poor kids prone to getting in trouble—to pursue careers in professions lacking Black representation, such as produce specialists, merchandisers, and store owners. He wants to expose children to fields in which they could
make money and make a difference in their communities. He is a member of the Rainbow PUSH Coalition’s International Trade Bureau, Jesse Jackson’s Black entrepreneurship development and advocacy arm focused on ensuring that minority- and women-owned businesses earned their fair share of government and corporate contracts, and he is an investor in development projects in underserved neighborhoods on Chicago’s South Side as well as a regular voice for economic activism on WVON.
    We couldn’t believe our luck. Before we said goodbye John and I wanted to hoist Karriem on our shoulders and carry him around the store. We didn’t, of course, but we did forge an immediate bond that would deepen into an enduring friendship. Driving away, with the aroma of all those delicious, healthy groceries filling our truck, I carried such hope. I couldn’t help thinking about what a difference just one store could make. Imagine if an enterprise like Karriem’s opened in the decimated neighborhood around J’s Fresh Meats. So much good was possible, and we were going to show people the way to make it so.

Chapter 2
    Canvassing the Community
    I N THE FIRST FEW WEEKS OF OUR EXPERIMENT WE continued our search for Black-owned businesses. If a place was in a predominantly Black neighborhood on Chicago’s West Side, like Garfield Park, Lawndale, or Austin, or in the predominantly Black western suburbs of Maywood or Bellwood, we’d check it out. Other Black parts of town exist, of course. The South Side is almost all Black, including the areas of Bronzeville, Englewood, Chatham, and Pullman, as are some far south suburbs, such as Harvey, South Holland, and Calumet City. But they are farther away and we wanted to start our search closer to home.
    We also explored some areas that are more stable and economically vibrant, such as Hyde Park, around the University of Chicago, and the near West Side around the University of Illinois at Chicago. Other pockets of the city are experiencing economic revitalization too, such as South Shore, a South Side neighborhood on Lake Michigan, and South Loop, located south of the city’s central business district, known as the Loop, but north of the South Side. However, many of the predominantly Black neighborhoods are still largely impoverished, crime stricken, and gutted, much like the West Side.
    Our experiment was getting off to a slow start. We did move our finances to Black-owned Covenant Bank on the West Side and signed with Foscett’s Communication & Alarm Co., an African American–owned
home security system in Chicago. We bought gas cards from Black-owned stations forty and fifty miles away with the intention of redeeming them at non-Black stations situated closer to us. We started getting our meals at Black-owned McDonald’s, where we’d also buy food cards to use at other outlets in the fast-food