What we are doing
We do not need another Black business.
Not if all it does is make one more Black person rich while the community remains poor.
A permanent homepage statement by Markus Bey
We were taught to judge one another by how we responded to the same circumstances.
Some of us learned to adjust.
Speak differently. Dress differently. Make people comfortable. Work hard. Follow the rules. Get the education. Get the job. Build a life inside the system.
Others resisted.
Some fought it openly. Some refused it. Some became angry. Some found belonging and protection wherever they could find it. Some ended up on streets, in gangs, in prisons, or simply outside what society called success.
And somewhere along the way, we began looking at one another as though we had taken completely different journeys.
I don’t think we did.
I think many of us were answering the same question with the choices we thought were available to us.
And I think both paths left scars.
So I want to ask a different question.
What if there were other choices?
More than sixty years later, our children are still inheriting the consequences.
Listen to what the elders were telling us.
“A race without authority and power, is a race without respect.”
“We should own and operate and control the economy of our community.”
“Integration is completely irrelevant to us: what we want is power for people who don’t have it.”
“The Negro is powerless, and he should seek to amass political and economic power to reach his legitimate goals.”
More than sixty years later, the question is what we are prepared to build with that understanding.
We do not need another Black business if its success ends with the person who owns it.
We need organized economic power capable of building something our children can inherit.
The Market is how we enter.
Our children are why we build.