August is Black Business Month, a designation that began in 2004 to bring attention to Black-owned businesses in the United States.
The US Census Bureau has conducted many surveys documenting business ownership and the self-employed. While the surveys show Black Americans form a disproportionately smaller share of these groups, there are aspects of entrepreneurship that are unique to the racial group.
The agency’s most recent count of businesses, the 2018 Annual Business Survey (ABS), found that Black or African Americans owned 124,004 employer businesses (firms with at least one paid employee) in 2017. This accounted for 2.2% of the 5.7 million employer businesses in the United States.
