Our Black Year by Maggie Anderson Read Free Book Online Page A

giant’s chain. Black-owned Evans Cleaners, in Maywood, got our dry cleaning.
    I wasn’t all that surprised that finding Black-owned businesses selling cell phone contracts, property insurance policies, or utilities was hard, if not impossible. In fact, finding one of those would have shocked me, but we looked anyway. What did surprise me was that we had so much trouble locating Black-owned stores for essential household goods—things like toiletries, cosmetics, and over-the-counter drugs. I searched all the online Black business directories for Black-owned dollar stores, the kind of place where I thought we could buy most of that stuff. I was sure—with so many dollar stores in predominantly Black neighborhoods—I’d find one. But the message that would flash across my laptop screen was always the same: “no results found.”
    In my quest for a Black-owned dollar store I looked for Black Chambers of Commerce. I found the Illinois Black Chamber, but there was no Chicago chapter or any directories. I called numerous community development groups in Black areas—nearly every neighborhood has one—figuring they would at least know of Black businesses there. It was tough just finding the groups, many of which don’t have websites. I uncovered a few helpful organizations, including Black Wall Street Chicago, which represented the once vibrant, now downtrodden 71st Street corridor in the heart of the South Side. In the end I called twenty-five listings for dollar stores in Black neighborhoods and found that all of their lines had been disconnected.
    Still, I continued looking. I went through twelve phone directories, pulling out more dollar store listings. Then I went to the library and dug up phone books for the entire city of Chicago, the South and West Sides, as well as for the predominantly Black south and far south suburbs. I also looked over two different versions of the Chicago Black Pages, a well-known and highly regarded directory found in many local
Black-owned barber shops, braid salons, restaurants, and churches and community centers. I must have spent thirty hours going through all the listings and making calls. I found many stores that were owned by Hispanics or by folks of Middle-eastern descent, but none that were Black-owned. I was astonished. Sometimes, out of curiosity, I asked for the owners’ names, which I’d then Google just to see where they lived. None of these proprietors resided in Black communities, even though their stores were there.
    That really bothered us. We started to absorb two disturbing dynamics: First, nurturing economic empowerment in a struggling Black community was not as simple as spending more dollars in that community because Black people didn’t own the businesses there. Second, the inability to retain desperately needed wealth in underserved Black areas was not simply a matter of Black consumers failing to keep money in the community but had just as much to do with outsiders siphoning away that wealth.
    The worst part for me was the message these dynamics sent our children. If they could not witness and engage with local Black business owners and professionals, how were these Black youth supposed to make it? They needed positive role models, especially in neighborhoods where drug dealers and gang bangers were actively recruiting them.
    I started to feel a little desperate, especially after we began to “canvass the community”—our phrase for an intense, boots-on-the-pavement search through the West Side and Maywood for Black businesses. We’d exhausted the strategy of looking for Black-sounding names in the phone book and online, and because we knew Black businesses had such short life spans, we thought there might be some new businesses out there that were not even listed. At the same time, we figured we’d find some hidden gems if we looked hard enough.
    Even though the brutal Chicago winter dampened our