Why the Rate of Black Business Ownership Is Going Up

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An NAACP flyer campaigning for the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill, which passed the U.S. House of Representatives in 1922, but was filibustered to defeat in the Senate. Dyer, the NAACP, and freedom fighters around the country, like Flossie Baily, struggled for years to get the Dyer and other anti-lynching bills passed, to no avail. Today there is still no U.S. law specifically against lynching. In 2005, eighty of the 100 U.S. Senators voted for a resolution to apologize to victims' families and the country for their failure to outlaw lynching. Courtesy of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

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Claude, age 23, just months before his 1930 murder. Courtesy of Faith Deeter.

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April 13, 2022

By Sharon Lurye, U.S. News

The number of Black small-business owners was 28% higher in the third quarter of 2021 than it was pre-pandemic.

African American business owners were one of the hardest hit groups at the beginning of the pandemic, but this group is now making a comeback. (Gett Inages)

The city of Pittsburgh has historically struggled to lift up Black businesses, having the lowest rate of Black business ownership of any large city in the U.S.

But around 2020, things started to change.

In a normal year, the local Urban Redevelopment Authority gives out around 30-50 loans. In 2020, it gave out over 350 loans – and almost half went to Black-owned businesses.

Pittsburgh is part of a larger trend. African American business owners were one of the hardest hit groups at the beginning of the pandemic, with the number of self-employed people dropping 31% from the first quarter of 2020 to the second, according to census data compiled by Robert Fairlie, a research associate at the University of California in Santa Cruz.

But now, this group is making a comeback. Just over 1.2 million African Americans were self-employed in February 2022, compared to slightly under 1.1 million in February 2020. Another study from the website domain company GoDaddy found that Black owners have accounted for 26% of all websites created for new businesses since the pandemic began, compared to 15% before.

Read the rest of the article about the upswing in black businesses.

Learn about black business owners, including athletes and farmers, and the consumers who patronize them.

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