[Black Business\Maggie Anderson]
Marketplace: “Anderson stuck with the project to “expose how few Black businesses there still are, to refute negative stereotypes about Black-owned businesses…”
Photo: Maggie Anderson
Yelp searches for Black-owned businesses have spiked since the police killing of George Floyd, but for Maggie Anderson, author of “Our Black Year,” and founder of the Empowerment Experiment Foundation, buying Black is much more than a trend.
It’s been her way of life for over a decade.
On Jan. 1, 2009, Anderson and her husband, John, embarked on a yearlong journey to spend their money at only Black-owned businesses.
The couple wanted to do something drastic, Anderson explained, “out of love for our community,” although she “had no idea how hard it would be.” For example, there was “only one Black-owned grocery store in all of Illinois, and that grocery store closed five months before we finished our year.”
But Anderson stuck with the project to “expose how few Black businesses there still are, to refute negative stereotypes about Black-owned businesses and to show the economic injustice that still persists in America.”
Read the rest of this Marketplace story here: https://www.marketplace.org/2020/07/28/shifting-black-hair-care-industry-back-into-black-hands/
