By Dennis Quick
Senior Staff Writer

Recently I stopped by Books, Herbs & Spices, an alternative health food store on Spring Street, to chat with owner Thomas Williams about Charleston’s black-owned business scene.

“It’ll be a quick conversation,” said Williams, who is black.

Although we both laughed at Williams’ quick retort, we knew it really was no laughing matter. There simply aren’t that many black-owned businesses in the region.

Between 1997 and 2002, the number of black-owned businesses in the United States increased by 45% to 1.2 million, according to a U.S. Census Bureau report released in April.

However, during that same period, the number of black-owned businesses in South Carolina grew by only about half the national rate. In 2002, there were 28,613 black businesses in the Palmetto State, 23% more than in 1997.

And although blacks comprised 30% of South Carolina’s population in 2002, only 9.8% of South Carolina businesses were black-owned. Black-owned businesses accounted for a mere 1% of the state’s sales.

If you combine the Lowcountry’s Indian, Chinese, Mexican and Japanese populations, the number would be far lower than the 32% that blacks comprise. And yet black folks—no strangers to the art of cooking or the joy of good food—own zero eateries out my way and very few anywhere else.

How many black-owned restaurants and other businesses are there supposed to be, you ask? Beats me. But there ought to be more than there are.

That’s why Williams is something of a standout: His Books, Herbs & Spices has been in business for 28 years. His business appeals to a lot of people, both black and white.

Williams is aware of a tradition of black entrepreneurship and invention that seems to have been forgotten nowadays.

Sad irony

It’s sadly ironic that black businesses across the South flourished most during the ugly days of segregation. While Jim Crow reigned, blacks owned everything from Negro League professional baseball teams to hotels to restaurants to banks.

John Sibley Butler’s book, “Entrepreneurship and Self-Help Among Black Americans,” published about 15 years ago, notes that in the 1920s four black-owned banks sprang up in South Carolina, two of them in Charleston: Charleston Mutual Savings and Peoples Federation. The first lasted a decade, crashing in 1930; the second died in 1926 after a six-year stint. Even though they were short-lived, they existed, which is more than we can say today.

Butler’s book also lists about 145 black inventors and their patents from 1860 to 1900. B.H. Taylor invented a rotary engine in 1878. Wade Washington invented a corn-husking machine in 1883. J.L. Love invented a pencil sharpener in 1897. J.F. Pickering invented an air ship in 1900. Even though none of these inventions were the first of their kind, they were still inventions.

All of this is fascinating and awe-inspiring. These folks demonstrated what can be accomplished despite the odds. At a time when racism was absolutely vicious, they invented products and operated businesses.

Teach the young

In the 1990s, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People launched its Youth Entrepreneurial Institute. It’s a program for high school students, ages 14 to 18, who live in low-income areas and maintain at least a 2.0 grade point average. Students learn how to develop an idea into a business plan and then transform that plan into a business venture.

We need to find more ways to sell entrepreneurship to black kids, to package it in a way that appeals to them.

Yet, even if owning a business were presented as a hip thing to do, convincing young blacks in the Charleston area to get on board still would remain a huge challenge, largely because the kids have so few examples to follow. Williams is but one of a relative handful.

“It’s hard to emulate what you can’t see,” local black attorney Dwayne Green told me.

But then, historian Carl Bridenbaugh tell us in his book, “Cities in the Wilderness: The First Century of Urban Life in America,” published in 1938, that in the early 1700s, in a South Carolina city called Charles Town, black artisans like Jack the ship carpenter and Prince the bricklayer and plasterer got their businesses going without a whole lot of examples to follow.

Most likely, they were among the first.

Come to think of it, maybe our black youth do have plenty of entrepreneurial examples—Jack, Prince and the many hundreds who followed in their footsteps.

They’re right there in our history pages, waiting to be discovered.

Dennis Quick is senior staff writer at the Business Journal. E-mail him at dquick@charlestonbusiness.com.

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