Stephanie Byrd agonized over temporarily laying off nearly the entire staff at her family’s trio of Detroit businesses when the coronavirus pandemic hit. But she’s not just concerned about the impact on their bottom line. She’s worried other black-owned businesses will struggle to withstand another wave of economic uncertainty, following decades of inequity that made it hard for many to flourish in the first place. “Most of the people I know who have businesses and are black are terrified right now,” said Byrd, whose family owns Flood’s Bar & Grille, The Block restaurant and the city’s Garden Theater. “There could be a new wave of black businesses that are able to reinvent themselves post-pandemic, but black businesses could also be wiped out for the most part within a black city. What would it look like without black-owned businesses?” COVID-19 has disproportionately impacted black Americans, infecting and killing them at higher rates across the nation. But experts say the pandemic has also exacerbated existing economic disparities and raised fresh concerns about the survival of black businesses, many of which have been the backbone of cities like Detroit and Atlanta for years. They also worry the pandemic could widen the existing black wealth gap. According to the Federal Reserve’s 2016 Survey of Consumer Finance, the median white family net worth of $171,000 is about 10 times greater than that of a black family’s, which is $17,150. Black businesses historically have struggled to gain access to financing due to discriminatory lending practices and a lack of relationships with big banks. But civil rights leaders and historians say their struggles are also rooted in the simmering effects of racism and Jim Crow-era laws that enforced racial segregation and denied black people equal opportunities. “Structural racism has created an environment where black businesses are starved for capital,” said Marc Morial, president and CEO of the National Urban League, a civil rights and urban advocacy organization. Juliet Walker, founder of University of Texas at Austin’s Center of Black Business, History, Entrepreneurship and Technology, said black enterprises existed even prior to the Civil War. They especially thrived during a “golden age” from 1900 to 1930 in areas such as Tulsa, Oklahoma’s Greenwood District, known as Black Wall Street. But those moments were short-lived. Tulsa’s once-thriving African American business community was destroyed in 1921 when a racist white mob killed hundreds of black residents. Black residents attempted to rebuild in the decades that followed, only to see their work erased during urban renewal of the 1960′s. “Blacks were able to establish successful business enterprises during the age of slavery where black people had no political or economic rights,” Walker said. “Yet, here we are today and the position of blacks in business differs very little from the position of blacks during the age of slavery.” Detroit was once home to Black Bottom and Paradise Valley — two predominantly African American neighborhoods, the latter of which had more than 350 black-owned businesses and a music scene that drew the likes of Louis Armstrong and Billie Holiday. Both were wiped out in the 1950′s and 1960’s, when a nearly all-white city government allowed the construction of a freeway system through the heart of the neighborhoods. Jamon Jordan, a black historian based in Detroit, said the pandemic could have a similar […]
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