Our Black Year (5 page)

But there I was, credit card in hand. I didn't want to embarrass this woman because of our obvious, painful class distinction. I tried to, let's
say, “blend in.” I changed my tone, infused a little more Ebonics and Southern drawl into my small talk. Basically, I reverted back to how just about everyone in Liberty City talked when I lived there.

She made adjustments too. I was a guest, like anyone from Oak Park with advanced degrees from the University of Chicago would be, even a White person. I was much more that person than I was a
sistah
, a Black mother needing some groceries. Unlike during the civil rights era, when Blacks from diverse backgrounds felt as if they were in the same struggle, the only thing that stood out now was the unavoidable, awkward relationship of a poor, uneducated Black woman serving an upper-class, highly educated Black woman—two planets orbiting around each other. “You have a blessed day,” she said, smiling, trying to bridge all that was between us with kindness. I thanked her and smiled back. I headed out the door, climbed back into the truck, and was a little overwhelmed with all that had converged in that stooped store.

How dare you run a business like this
, I thought. Then I remembered those babies on the floor, and my heart broke.

The J's Fresh Meats lady was the stereotype we see caricatured in the news and in the movies, the one we whisper about when we see her in the Black restaurants in gentrifying areas of Chicago's Hyde Park, or the one we disdain when she dares to make her way to the malls, parks, and restaurants of our exclusive suburb.

We were wrong to judge her, but the certainty of our assessment assuaged our guilt. That was one of the perks of being in the Black bourgeoisie: We could utter the most prejudiced remarks about people like her—comments we would denigrate White folks for saying—because we are Black. When White folks look at her with pity or hate, they do so without knowing who she is or why her life has ended up this way. But we know. Many of us come from backgrounds similar to hers, and we have cousins and childhood friends like her. That is the difference.

But my education in urban food shopping was just beginning.

Our next stop was Mario's Butcher Shop, a few forlorn blocks away from J's. “We're the heart and soul of the West Side,” claimed the big sign out front. It looked like an ideal place for the adventure portion of
the experiment. More of a full-service grocery, with a parking lot, shopping carts, even Martin Luther King Jr.'s picture on a front window, Mario's advertised seven different types of chitlins on sale—black chitlins, green chitlins, sausage chitlins, cleaned chitlins, boxed chitlins, tub-o-chitlins, half-tub-o-chitlins. I thought,
Am I in some parody flick? Is Martin Lawrence going to come stomping out of the door in drag?

But finding a full-service grocery store in a place like the West Side is a miracle, no matter what it may look like. Folks living in Austin buy food from convenience stores, gas stations, and liquor stores, or they take the bus or drive to Oak Park.

We were about to park when I noticed a woman pushing a shopping cart. I rolled down my window.

“Hi,” I said, in my Perky Maggie tone, smiling. “I'm trying to find a Black-owned grocery store. Do you know if this place is Black-owned?”

“
Hell
, no,” she said.

“But, I saw the Martin Luther King picture and all that. Are you sure? Should I just get out and ask?”

“You don't have to go and ask, honey. No way is this place Black-owned. It's owned by some Italians or some Greeks. You walk in, the whole family is working there. No
way
is this place Black-owned. There are
no
Black-owned grocery stores.”

She treated us like we were insane for thinking it might be otherwise. I said, “Okay, well, thank you,” and she loaded her bags into the trunk, got in her car, and pulled out.

We decided to go inside anyway, just to be sure. On the wall, past the photos of Jesse Jackson and Malcolm X, was a photo of a White guy and his family—the owners. But all the customers in the store were Black. We walked to the produce section and saw that it was dirty; all we found were bruised apples, near rotten bananas, and smelly potatoes in a cardboard box. We found an entire lane of greens, but they were wilted and gave off a stench. I saw mold and decided we weren't going to explore the meat section. We turned and walked out. We had had enough for one day.

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

I
N 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.