With Obama center coming, hope seen for black-owned businesses

Then the group will raise a glass for accomplishing a feat that elsewhere is often taken for granted: building thriving businesses in under-resourced, often overlooked communities in the Chicago area.

“Black entrepreneurs show us there is a way to create your own destiny,” said Barber, who runs the marketing firm WDB Marketing. She began holding the gathering to spotlight and celebrate small business owners. “We are job creators. We are community assets. This event is really about telling a new story, and changing perceptions. We are here and people should see us.”

Barber’s celebration, the LEGACY Gala, isn’t the first effort to connect African-American business owners or celebrate them as a way of encouraging them to grow and expand. The Chicago Urban League and the Rainbow PUSH Coalition have annual events and educational programs aimed at nurturing minority entrepreneurs.

But Barber’s event comes when there is a growing urgency to cultivate and support black-owned businesses and firms in the Chicago area. The Obama Presidential Center is expected to bring thousands of visitors to the South Side, which could infuse the area with a new customer base and even new residents.

More African-Americans are realizing that not only is entrepreneurship the pathway toward wealth, it is the only way crime-plagued, poor communities will ever improve. It’s small businesses that are willing to give job opportunities to people who get dismissed by corporate America, said Steven Rogers, a professor at the Harvard Business School who teaches a course called Black Business Leaders and Entrepreneurs.

Phillip Jackson, executive director of the Black Star Project, said that not only did business closures leave communities with boarded-up storefronts and crumbling buildings, it was a blow to the job market.  “Black people used to employ tens of thousands of other black people in this city,” he said. “There was a time when we owned gas stations and drugstores and corner stores. We had anchor businesses that created opportunities for other businesses. They are gone.”  To help spark a pipeline toward entrepreneurship, Jackson has developed a curriculum for young students to learn about black millionaires and to take lessons from them.

“If we don’t teach how black entrepreneurs became millionaires, then we are part of the problem,” he said.

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