Yolanda Bledsoe and Deidra Keener were deliberate about who they hired to build out their DeSoto bakery, 2 Sisters Sweet Creations. They signed on Black contractors for a majority of the shop’s needs, from flooring, to establishing their LLC, to their uniforms.
Even though Black people make up more than 15% of the Dallas-Fort Worth population, Black businesses are disproportionately underrepresented. As a way to correct economic inequities Black businesses face, consumers have been pushed time and time again to buy Black.
Major retailers like Target and JCPenney brought on more Black brands and new social media accounts surfaced dedicating themselves to listing Black-owned firms following the killing of George Floyd and as COVID-19 shuttered businesses.
The call offers support to Black business owners, whose companies disproportionately earn less than their peers and in the early months of the pandemic, saw higher rates of closure.
Outside of corporate initiatives to buy Black, there are community-level functions like one supported by the Rev. Frederick D. Haynes, pastor of Friendship-West Baptist Church. Haynes has hosted West Wall Street events since 2016 at the Oak Cliff megachurch, a recurring shopping market where the public can discover Black brands, like 2 Sisters.
“It was very successful for us,” Keener said of the first West Wall Street event in 2016. “We were able to get lots of customers from there, people who are still our customers to this day.”
West Wall Street gave Bledsoe and Keener a platform. It allowed them to establish a customer base and move their pastry project from a part-time gig to a full-time storefront in September 2021. Nearly a year and a half later, the sisters are almost busier than they can manage.
Bledsoe and Keener’s business took off as Haynes pushed his community to shop Black brands. But Keener said alone, the message is insufficient.
“It’s a good first step,” Haynes said. “If it’s the last step, then you know it’s almost tweaking a problem as opposed to actually addressing it.”
The goal of the movement is to generate and maintain wealth among Black communities. But local leaders said the consumer-driven initiative falls short in addressing the root issues of the nation’s economic inequities and how they play out in Dallas.
Tré Black, chief executive officer of On-Target Supplies & Logistics, a regional logistics firm in Dallas and son of prominent business leader Albert Black, said while there’s plenty of reasons to celebrate the Buy Black movement in the U.S., there is more work that needs to be done to bring the Black community closer to economic equality and more prosperity.
“I think it moves the needle, but just not enough,” Black said.
Underrepresented and underfinanced
Black people make up more than 15% of the area’s population, but are disproportionately underrepresented as business owners in Dallas-Fort Worth.
Black-owned businesses make up just north of 3,000 of the roughly 123,000 employer firms, or about 2% of ventures across Dallas-Fort Worth, according to data from a 2021 U.S. Census Bureau American Business Survey. It reflects the national average of 2% of American businesses being Black-owned.
More than half of Black-owned firms across the U.S. brought in less than $100,000 in revenue in 2020. In the first few months of the pandemic, 41% of Black-owned shops closed their doors, compared to 17% of white businesses, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research.
Less than a third of Latino-owned businesses brought in less than $100,000 in revenue and 13% of white-owned businesses.
The following year, the rate of Black businesses earning less than $100,000 climbed to nearly two-thirds, according to a Small Business Credit Survey from the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System.
Matt Houston, a business professor at the University of North Texas and a board member of Dallas’ Black Chamber of Commerce, said support from corporate institutions is important for Black-owned firms. The investment allows businesses to employ more people from their communities and expand wealth, he said.
Black-owned brands tend to remain small in size. Across the country, 96% of Black-owned firms employed fewer than 20 people in 2021, according to the Federal Reserve System’s 2022 Small Business Credit Survey report.
FinishLine Tax Solutions is a local outlier. The Plano tax resolution firm started as a two-man shop more than six years ago and now employs more than 70 people, half of whom are people of color, said co-founder Scott Curley. It was crucial to Curley to offer opportunities for employment with his community to share financial stability.
Tre’ Black said a shortcoming of corporate Buy Black initiatives are their near-exclusive partnerships with single-digit employee start-ups. To make a larger impact, corporations ought to work with more mid-size companies, Black said.
“These initiatives are not creating robust workforces,” Black said. “They’re not creating employment pools that really are good for communities.”
Keeping Black wealth in the neighborhood
Target committed to spending $2 billion with Black-owned businesses by 2025. In comparison to 2020, the retail giant has increased the dollars spent with Black companies and suppliers by more than 50% and doubled the count of Black-owned brands to more than 100.
JCPenney overhauled its beauty department by adding more than 70 brands representing Black and Brown founders.
“By creating a fully ownable beauty experience, JCPenney can quickly adapt and respond to our customers’ wants and needs,” said Michelle Wlazlo, JCPenney’s executive vice president and chief merchandising officer.
It’s not entirely selfless on the sellers’ part. Adding more retail options that appeal to Black shoppers, grants the retailers access to underserved markets eager to support brands that cater to their interests.
Advocates and skeptics alike question its efficacy in practice, arguing the messaging is mostly posturing, rather than creating tangible change in Black communities.
Black influence in retail is expected to continue growing alongside the group’s buying power, which is projected to reach $1.8 trillion by 2024, according to a 2022 Nielsen IQ report. In Texas, Black buying power led the nation with $148 billion in 2020, followed by New York and Georgia, according to the University of Georgia’s Selig Center for Economic Growth annual report.
Over a quarter of Black Americans say they purchase from Black-owned brands frequently, according to a Morning Consult survey. For Black people under 35, that share jumps to 40%.
Spending by Black shoppers has increased 5% annually over the last two decades, according to a McKinsey report. In 2019, it totaled around $835 billion. Black spending outpaces the 3 percent growth rate from white households, in part due to faster population growth among Black Americans.
But the group struggles to secure business from one of the largest customers in the world. The federal government spends billions on products from lightbulbs to runways, however minority-owned small businesses received less than a tenth of those contracts in 2020, according to the U.S. Small Business Administration. Black-owned firms made up less than 2%.
For Michael Carter, the founder of Black Wall Street USA, a group working to establish prosperous Black neighborhoods, increasing the rate of Black bonded contractors is a priority for creating greater economic equity in Texas.
In southern Dallas, Haynes said he and his parishioners talk about an economic blockade on their side of I-30. “When it comes to procurement opportunities from city, county and statewide contracts, we’re often on the losing end.”
Texas spent more than $3.3 billion in purchases related to heavy construction, building construction, special trade and professional services in fiscal year 2021, of which an average of 11% went to state-certified historically underutilized businesses, according to the Texas Comptroller. The state said its goals are to increase its contracts with minority-owned firms to an average of 23% across sectors.
Black Wall Street has specific benchmarks for Texas. They hope to increase Black-owned businesses by 10% through 2025 and increase the employment by Black businesses by a third.
When Carter started Black Wall Street, he began with a vision: A little girl walks outside her house and across the street she sees Black enterprise, she looks to the left, Black enterprise, to the right of her porch, Black enterprise.
He’s working to create districts in the spirit of Greenwood, a district in Tulsa, Oklahoma, that came to be known as America’s Black Wall Street. Its success was destroyed more than a century ago in the Tulsa Race Massacre, where hundreds of residents were killed and more than 1,250 homes were burned by a white mob. Estimates suggest property damage from the massacre cost north of $200 million in 2020 dollars.
West Wall Street at Friendship-West Baptist Church is one of countless homages to Greenwood’s legacy of Black enterprise.
“Where you spend your dollars is power,” Haynes said. “It’s about building power, and power gives you the ability to affect change.”
About four-in-10 Black adults say having all businesses in Black neighborhoods be owned by Black people would be an extremely or very effective strategy to overcoming inequality, according to new data from Pew Research. In DeSoto, more than two-thirds of ventures are Black-owned.
“DeSoto represents a modern day, middle class, wealthy, Black community that came about because of need and necessity,” Carter said. “Our goal is to increase that vision of Greenwood in Texas and all over.”
More than two-thirds of DeSoto’s population is Black and the median household income in 2021 was nearly $80,000, higher than both Dallas’ and Texas’ medians.
“DeSoto, of course, has great possibilities,” Haynes said. “We know the money is there. But the question is, will the opportunities be there? Will the investment be there? Will the access to capital be there?”
Lack of access to capital is dire problem
When trying to transition her bakery to a brick-and-mortar business, Keener said she struggled to secure funding from a variety of financial institutions and got nowhere with the Small Business Administration.
“We’ve gone through some very difficult times because we had to build everything up from ourselves,” Keener said.
A lack of access to capital in southern Dallas and among Black business owners is repeatedly listed as a leading barrier to achieving economic equality.
Among creating increased financial opportunities for underrepresented founders, Black said actionable items to bridge the wealth gap include entrepreneurship education in public schools, increasing board of director diversity and upskilling employees to create more growth trajectory for minority employees.
Institutions like the Dallas Black Chamber of Commerce have traditionally served as a meeting hub for Black founders more than 800 members. The chamber is working to support smaller, digital and grassroots initiatives to point people toward Black businesses.
“It’s providing healthy ecosystems for Black businesses across Dallas,” Houston said.
Since opening its doors in DeSoto, 2 Sisters Sweet Creations can no longer run as a two-person shop. They’re looking to hire staff to fill the growing number of orders. Work has caused them to miss out on a few West Wall Street events, but in December, the sisters were able to join in again.
“It was like a homecoming,” Bledsoe said.
