Our Black Year (2 page)

I admit we got carried away that night, imagining how far something like this could go toward effecting real change. It was inspiring. It was heady. It was awesome.

And then life derailed it.

I got pregnant and we traded the yuppie condo near the University of Chicago for a split-level in Oak Park, a comfortable, slightly urban, fairly liberal, and racially diverse suburb on Chicago's western border. Ernest Hemingway was born and raised there, and Frank Lloyd Wright had lived there, designing twenty-five buildings in town.

Our first daughter, Cara, arrived in July 2005. Then came Cori in November 2006. We had a deck built, then the roof repaired. After spending $30,000 on remodeling the basement, we realized that would have been a plum gig for a Black contractor. The same thought popped into our heads a few months later after we bought a Cadillac at a dealer thirty-five miles away, just because it had the color we wanted right on the lot, when there was one—owned by a member of 100 Black Men and an active role model for at-risk Black youth—only ten miles from our door.

“So when are we going to start buying Black?” we would periodically ask each other. Despite our resolute response, the result was always the same: inaction.

Then came a rainy morning in June 2008. We scrambled to get the girls to day care as the torrential rains just kept coming. When the storm finally let up, I was late for work and hopped on the train into the city. Standing in one of the aisles was our old friend Nat, who I hadn't seen in years.

Nat's another Black professional like us, a lawyer. He's equally frustrated with the situation in the Black community and is trying to make a difference. Years ago we volunteered together at PUSH.

Maybe the rain brings out the more pensive person in all of us. Maybe not. But on the train we got beyond the small talk and began a discussion about problems plaguing African American communities. Nat finally asked me,
Well, what are you going to do?

I mentioned our idea about “buying Black,” and Nat wanted to hear more. We got off the train, and it turned out that we were headed to the same building. We walked and talked about The Ebony Experiment. His enthusiasm fed mine.

Before we said good-bye, he suggested John and I put the concept in writing. We could then pass it on to Nat's cousin Adrienne Samuels, a reporter at
Ebony
magazine, the iconic African American monthly that's been promoting uplifting images, news, and stories about the culture and community since 1945. She might be able to generate some media attention or maybe even set up a meeting with Linda Johnson Rice, chairman and CEO of Johnson Publishing, which publishes
Ebony
and
Jet
magazines.

That night John and I sat in bed and started outlining a plan. We would “buy Black” for ninety days—no, a year. We would save all our receipts and input our purchases into a spreadsheet to be analyzed later. We would enlist academics to monitor the potential of buying Black and use hard data to defy negative stereotypes about Black businesses. We would create a foundation, enlist a board of advisers, and set up a slick website. We would encourage others to join us. We would mount a media campaign. It would be part experiment, part social activism.

The major goal was to prove that average individuals could generate significant economic growth in the Black community if they committed to purchasing from Black-owned businesses. John and I—and Cara and Cori—couldn't do that alone. But our effort could shine a light on the issue and inspire the kind of examination that, in time, could make the point. It could—and, we hoped, would—inspire others to do the same.

And yet as much as we wanted to make the world think this was a natural and normal way to live, we knew it would be a challenging undertaking. But we were both well versed in creating and completing detailed projects, so we went to work on this one. I would end the consulting work I had been doing on a contract basis. That made John the sole breadwinner. We, as a family, would accommodate him so he could make as much money as possible. As for our specific roles in the project, John would be involved with major decisions, meetings, and media appearances. My job was to run the day-to-day operations: monitor and answer all e-mails, do interviews, maintain the website, find Black-owned businesses, research economic empowerment issues, and call on business owners, community leaders, and other VIPs to tell them about us and beg for help. In addition, I would drive the girls to and from day care, shop, cook, clean, and, in general, take care of the family.

The ground rules for our new lifestyle—and the lifestyle we hoped other African Americans would embrace—were simple: If we were going to make a purchase, we'd take a few minutes to do some research to see if we could get what we wanted from a Black-owned business. Or if we knew of a Black firm that offered the product or service, we would give them our business even if the company was a little out of the way or more expensive. We were going to be more proactive too. We would do research to find the Black-made products already available at mass retailers like Walgreens and Jewel, a prominent food-store chain in the Chicago area, and we would buy them. We would assess the recurring, everyday needs of the household and then see if a local or otherwise convenient Black business could fulfill them.

A week after my chance meeting with Nat, amid the flurry of planning, I met with Adrienne to talk about The Ebony Experiment. Like her
cousin, she loved the idea and started the ball rolling. She talked about covering the story for the entire year and helped us refine the concept. She even offered to take it to the corporate folks to consider sponsorship.

In August of 2008 we got some jarring news from Atlanta, where my parents had been living, near my brother Eduardo and his family. My mother had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, which kills within a year 80 percent of the people diagnosed with the disease. The five-year survival rate is about 4 percent.

My mom, who I call Mima, the most powerful force for good in my life, had been given a death sentence at the moment I was embarking on what I saw as a life-changing experience and—if we were lucky—a powerful movement for all African Americans. Something she'd be so proud of. At first I was hesitant to tell her about our plans, but when I finally did, she loved the idea. I knew then that I couldn't back out, no matter what was going on with her health.

Also encouraging was the positive mood that seemed to be spreading across America at that time. Barack Obama—my favorite professor in law school, a fellow PUSH worker, and a member of my church—kept gaining ground in Democratic presidential primaries. After earning a surprise victory in the Iowa caucuses, he rolled through New Hampshire, Michigan, and Nevada, racking up win after win.

John and I marveled at how unified we were becoming as Black people. The barriers between the Black working, middle, and upper classes seemed to give way. Distances between Whites and Blacks—between all races and cultures—seemed to be narrowing as well. After Obama launched his presidential campaign in February 2007, our dreams about eradicating Black economic disenfranchisement seemed less preposterous.

We understood that we might take a little heat from folks who believed we were being racist. But is it racist for Blacks to support their own, just like other ethnic groups do? We believed that crime, unemployment, education, and housing would improve in Black neighborhoods if robust,
Black-owned businesses were there. Didn't that make buying Black key to a self-help solution that was beneficial to everyone?

Once we committed to The Ebony Experiment, everything changed. No more anguished conversations about the state of Black America—we were taking action. In the weeks that followed we kept bouncing ideas off each other, like we were starting a business, buying a new house, or planning an awesome party.

And then we elected our first Black president. Remember the rally in Grant Park? We were there that night. And yes, through our tears, we talked about The Ebony Experiment.

Mainstream America was in love with another smart Black couple from Chicago with two beautiful daughters. Folks like us were feeling triumphant, thinking about what equality really means. Whites were moved and encouraged, too—more prone to empathy and tolerance.

It was a perfect storm for a movement, and we were ready to be in the eye of that storm.

How hard could it be to start our experiment? After this one courageous move, public and well planned, the community would be sure to stand with us. The larger society would be watching too. Some of them might judge us, but for sure, enough would join in to ensure historic progress.

“This can be it,” I remember telling John. “Can you imagine? What if it works?”

And John said, “It has to work. It just has to.”

This was our moment, John and I thought.

But the news from Atlanta was dire. By Thanksgiving of 2008 Mima had undergone four months of chemotherapy. My mother was on life support in the Intensive Care Unit. She was totally unconscious. I left John and the girls in Chicago and went to Atlanta, where Papa, my two brothers, and I would spend what we thought would be Mima's last days together.

It was five weeks before The Ebony Experiment launch. John wanted us to postpone it, out of respect for my dad and me and in honor of Mima, but I wanted to press on, for precisely the same reasons. We had already hired a public relations firm to help us write the press release announcing
the experiment and pitch the story to major media outlets. We'd also secured a website developer to design our site. In addition to that, we had invested our energy in trying to engage high-profile academics to help us conduct a study at minimum cost. We wanted to start building the directory of Black businesses we were finding. We were worried about funding, and much of my time was spent preparing presentations to land a key funding source.

But the website development was laborious. We had to write the content for all the sections, take the pictures, create and embed the video, design a logo, come up with a tagline. I remember whispering on the phone with the web team while my family met with doctors who were urging us to remove my mother from life support.

One day my dad talked with me about The Ebony Experiment. He knew I felt torn, so he told me that Mima would want me to go on with it. Still, I was overwhelmed and conflicted. But I started to look on this project as a fight, just as Mima was fighting, and just as she had always exhorted me to fight against injustice.

“Lucha M'iha,” Mima would tell me. “Lucha!” Fight, my daughter.

And fight I did.

Somehow, Mima pulled through those grim days after Thanksgiving. She rallied, and the doctors let her out of the hospital right before Christmas. She would not walk, eat, or use the bathroom for the next few months. But she was home.

A few weeks after her release, John and I sat on a couch in our website developer's studio. We were reading from the cue cards I'd written for our website introduction. We were spending close to $5,000 on this venture, and it hadn't even started yet.

“Welcome to The Ebony Experiment,” John said into the camera.

Then I jumped in and talked about our “typical Black family making a not-so-typical commitment. We publicly pledge to support exclusively Black businesses and professionals for an entire year.”

John—Mr. Harvard economics degree—talked about the almost 2.5 million Black households in the United States with six-figure incomes, about how “Black businesses create Black jobs.”

“If a few of us make a little sacrifice next year,” he said, “we could infuse millions into struggling Black households and communities.”

“And we can say that
we
did it,” I said, “not some government program.

“Since the presidential election, all we do is talk about what's next,” I continued. “In my house, this is what's next. Are you so busy living the dream that you have given up fighting for the dream?”

“Just be a part of this experiment,” John added, “this movement, in any way you can.”

Our yearlong odyssey of empowerment was about to begin. We had no idea what we were getting into.

Chapter 1

The closer we got to J's Fresh Meats, the more my stomach hurt. It wasn't supposed to be like this.

When John and I came up with the idea for this adventure—officially launched with this shopping trip to Chicago's bombed-out West Side—we hadn't envisioned J's Fresh Meats. The store looked like a cement shack, more suited for staging some sort of illicit activity than buying groceries. Located about a mile east of our home in Oak Park, J's was in Austin, a neighborhood on the far western border of Chicago. One of the densest areas of the city, it is also one of the Blackest—91 percent—and has been plagued for years by illegal drug trafficking, street gang mayhem, and some of the highest murder rates in the city.