Our Black Year

by Maggie Anderson

  We soon learned the ugly truth: There was only one Black-owned, full-service grocery store in the area, and that was Farmers Best Market, located on the South Side. We were really surprised. After all, Chicago isn’t exactly Bennington, Vermont. It’s the third largest metropolitan area in the country and has one of the largest populations of African Americans. More than nine million people live there, and nearly two million of those folks are non-Hispanic Blacks.

  But the Windy City, perhaps the most American of all cities, turns out to be much like the rest of the country. African American–owned full-service grocery stores are rare.

  They once were abundant. In the early decades of the twentieth century there were 6,339 African American–owned and/or–operated grocery stores in the United States. In fact, according to The Encyclopedia of African-American Business, “grocery stores were considered the largest category of Black-owned enterprises” in the 1930s. Prospects started changing for Black-owned grocers and many other Black retailers with the emergence of the civil rights movement. Basically, their numbers dwindled.

  By the new millennium nineteen African American–owned grocery stores existed in the United States. One of those was Community Pride food market, a highly successful grocery chain based in Richmond, Virginia, that by 2004 had closed, reportedly after its supplier forced the enterprise into poor business deals and failed to provide the stores with satisfactory material for sale.

  More recently, in 2010, a team of students from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University conducted online research and uncovered only three African American–owned grocery stores in the entire United States. Of the three, the phone number for one in Southfield, Michigan, was incorrect; another establishment, the Bravo supermarket in Harlem, was actually Hispanic-owned. The only store they could confirm was Leon’s Thriftway in Kansas City, Missouri, founded by Leon Stapleton in 1968, a time when there were other Black-owned groceries in that community. Since 1968, the rest of them have all closed.

  Looking at the 2002 Census Economic Report, the Kellogg team found 9,016 Black-owned food and beverage retail businesses, a number they noted was misleading because it includes liquor retail and specialty food stores in addition to grocery stores. But that number—as unlikely as it is—still amounts to only 6 percent of all the 148,901 food and beverage stores in the United States.

  “This is disheartening,” the team wrote in its report, “considering Blacks comprise 13 percent of the US population in 2002,” and that they tend to buy more groceries per capita than other demographic groups. “In order to reflect the percentage of Blacks within the US, nearly 10,341 additional Black-owned grocery stores need to be opened.”

  That didn’t look like it was going to happen anytime soon.

  The next day we packed the girls into the Trailblazer and pointed it east then south. Forty-five minutes, fourteen miles, and about fifteen grocery stores later, we pulled into the parking lot of the Black-owned grocery store we’d heard about, Farmers Best Market, located at 1424 W. 47th Street on Chicago’s predominantly Black South Side. From the outside the place looked decent—more than decent. My little internal bird of hope began chirping.

  When we walked inside I felt like Dorothy making her first trip to the Emerald City.

  It was clean. It was bright. The produce was fresh. The selection of foods was wide. The employees were professional. And they came in different flavors—some Hispanic, some Black, some White. What we couldn’t figure out was why the place was almost devoid of customers. But we didn’t dwell on that; instead, we went on a shopping spree. The girls were giggling. John was smiling, impressed and encouraged, and I was immensely relieved and grateful. Was that harp music I heard floating through the aisles?

  We loaded up our cart and headed to the register. The tab came to $350. I’m pretty sure I’ve never been so happy to pay such a large grocery bill. We were so pleased, in fact, with the entire experience that we asked the cute boy bagging our groceries if we could meet the owner. He walked to the back, and in a few minutes this normal-looking Black man appeared: clean-cut and wearing an ironed shirt. I was in the Emerald City, wasn’t I?

  “Nice to meet you,” he said with a firm handshake. “I’m Karriem Beyah. This is my place.”

  “A pleasure,” I said. I might have been glowing. “We’re the Andersons, your new best customers.”

  When we told him why we were there, he responded enthusiastically. Within minutes Karriem was telling us about people we needed to meet and resources we should tap for our experiment. He mentioned he was best friends with the owners of WVON, a local, influential Black-owned radio station, and he suggested we might be able to get a weekly segment. He played with the girls, and by the time our groceries were in the trunk, he was Uncle Karriem, an authentic hero of African American self-help economics.

  He had earned it. Born and raised in Chicago, Karriem and his family had done all their shopping at local, Black-owned stores on the South Side. His first job was working at his godfather’s grocery, which is where Karriem learned the business and dreamed of becoming an owner.

  After working as a meat packer and a truck driver for years, Karriem obtained a business degree from Chicago State University and then spent nineteen years at Dean Foods, the largest processor and distributor of dairy products in the United States. When he ended his career there, he was director of sales and marketing 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

  IN 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 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 enthusiasm for spending hours outside, we could still do our exploring while staying warm in our car. We made a concerted effort to check out Madison Street, Austin Boulevard, Chicago Avenue, Roosevelt Road, and Cicero Avenue—main arteries on the West Side. In Maywood we focused on the main streets of 1st, 5th, 9th, and 17th avenues as well as Madison Street, exploring a different thoroughfare each weekend.

  Madison Street, the city’s official north-south dividing line, is named for the fourth president of the United States, James Madison, and runs west more than twenty miles, with four breaks, from one of Chicago’s jewels, Millennium Park, to the tony suburb of Glen Ellyn. In between it passes some of the most architecturally significant buildings and important landmarks in the city—the Carson, Pirie Scott & Co. building, Chase Tower, the Civic Opera House, and the city’s two commuter rail stations—through Greek Town, next to the House That Michael Jordan Built (also known as the United Center) and the heart of Garfield Park, with its gilded dome and conservatory. A little more than three miles west, it reaches Oak Park.

  In the early 1800s, before Chicago was incorporated, Madison was the town’s southern boundary. By the middle of the century the corner of Madison and State Streets—to this day the center point of all numbered addresses in Chicago—became known as “the busiest corner of the world” and had the highest land values in the city. In the 1860s the West Side’s population quadrupled, from 57,000 to 214,000, casting the street’s—and the West Side’s—fate as a congested, almost entirely working-class swath of the city. It pretty much stayed that way, with a mix of ethnic groups—Italians, Jews, Greeks, and Irish—occupying chunks of the West Side. Though never an affluent area, the West Side and Madison Street deteriorated as they were pounded by the Great Depression, World War II, the construction of the Eisenhower Expressway and public housing projects, and absentee landlords. In the 1950s Blacks who were crowded out of the near West Side and South Side began moving to the Garfield Park neighborhood, which is just east of Austin. As a result, racial tensions grew, culminating in the riots that erupted after King’s assassination.

  Although Madison remains the commercial lifeline of several neighborhoods on the West Side, stretches of the avenue are sketchy. In February we would find out just how sketchy.

  The section we started driving regularly—from Oak Park through the West Side—became more congested the further east we ventured. We witnessed more life than what we’d seen further west around J’s, which was encouraging, but the blight and self-inflicted grime remained the same. In some ways the bustle was similar to that of Oak Park Avenue, one of our town’s commercial stretches, but instead of Cosi’s and the Gap, the area sported Divine Design Tattoos, a pawnshop, and a nail parlor.

  In addition, Madison was a fairly fast-paced street, not conducive to our slow cruising. All the shops were small and looked remarkably similar, which made spotting a potential gem difficult. If I saw one more church, day care center, funeral home, or liquor store, I was going to scream. What we needed to locate were a Black-owned convenience store, clothing shop, minimart, bakery, and general merchandise outlet or shoe store. It was hard to believe that we couldn’t find any. We started to blame ourselves because we hadn’t actually set foot in very many of the establishments.

  After a few failed attempts at drive-by cruising, we altered our approach in order to increase our chanc
es. When we learned of a business on the West Side that looked to be Black-owned, the whole family would pile into the Trailblazer and head for it. On our way there we’d keep an eye open for places that looked like they might be Black-owned. Even if the store didn’t seem to offer anything we wanted, as long as it looked safe, we’d walk in and ask about Black-owned businesses in the area. Except when the weather was too miserable or when one of the kids was sick, we went on these adventures almost every weekend during the first few months.

  One of the first places we found was MacArthur’s, a restaurant on Madison about one mile east of J’s Fresh Meats. We pulled up on a blustery Saturday in February, and the large parking lot was packed. A big, lovely sign welcomed folks, and from the outside, it seemed like an Old Country Buffet–type place that specialized in southern cuisine.

  Making our way to the front door, we encountered several friendly Black folks who commented on how adorable Cara and Cori were. As we waited for a table, we took in the smells and scene. It was pretty much what we had expected. The restaurant was set up like a cafeteria with a buffet line. The room’s burgundy walls were adorned with pictures of African American historical figures along with some of MacArthur’s more famous customers, including Robert Townsend, one of our favorite actors and producers; local hero and hip-hop phenom Kanye West; President Obama; and Mayor Richard Daley.

  The place was nearly full, with booths and tables spread across an expansive area. The upholstery was worn in places, but the tables were clean and each sported a small glass vase with a plastic flower. Most everyone there was our age or older and working class; there were some families, but many folks were in uniforms. The employees, wearing MacArthur’s tees and black Dockers, were smiling, moving fast, looking for tables to clean and customers in need. The space was a little tight, and I could see a few folks bump into others, softening the interaction with a squeeze on the waist or shoulder along with a “Sorry, baby.”