In Black America; Black Enterprise Magazine

THE UNEARTH OF FWIDE In Black America, reflections of the Black experience in American society. In an interview which appears in the August issue of Black Enterprise magazine, which many of you receive and which a copy of the cover is behind me, the outstanding executive of this great organization was asked, what is the present mission of the NAACP? Earl G. Graves is the founder and publisher of Black Enterprise magazine. Black Enterprise, a business-oriented, consumer interest magazine,

targeted to reach upscale Black professionals, business executives, and policy makers in the public and private sectors. As chief executive officer of six corporations under the parent company Earl G. Graves Limited, Mr. Graves has nationally recognized authority on Black business development. I'm John Hansen and this week our focus is on Black Enterprise magazine with the founder and publisher Earl G. Graves in Black America. What is the present mission of the NAACP? I'm certain his answer speaks for all of us, for his response was progress is our mission. Black Enterprise magazine has proven to be one of the most effective magazines in the industry today. Since 1970 when the magazine first began publishing, it has been profitable since its 10th issue and yearly sales are steadily increasing to over 6 million. Black Enterprise has a guaranteed circulation of 250,000

with a readership of more than 1.25 million. You can find the magazine carried on board most major airlines and founded new stands nationwide. Black Enterprise is the only magazine especially geared to reach Black professionals on the nationwide basis. The primary objective is to foster Black economic development and to serve as a tie line between the leadership of Black America and the nation's business community. Black Enterprise magazine is the only Black owned publication to ever be honored in a White House ceremony. This is due to its founder and publisher Earl G. Graves. And economists by training Mr. Graves received a BA degree in economics from Morgan State University in Baltimore. From 1965 to 1968, he was an administrative assistant to the late Senator Robert F. Kennedy. After Senator Kennedy's assassination, he formed his own management consulting firm to advise corporations on urban affairs and economic development.

Mr. Graves is presently recognized as an authority on Black business development. In 1972, as the publisher of Black Enterprise magazine, he was named one of the 10 most outstanding minority business men in the country by the President of the United States and presented the National War of Excellence in recognition of his achievement in minority business enterprise. In 1974, he was named one of Time Magazine's 200 Future Leaders of this country. Today, he had six corporations, Earl G. Graves Limited, the parent company, EGG Dallas Broadcasting Incorporated, BCI Marketing Incorporated, the Earl G. Graves Marketing and Research Company Incorporated, the Earl Graves Development Company, and the Earl G. Graves Publishing Company Incorporated, publishers of Black Enterprise magazine. We go back to 1969, which was the beginning of the Nixon administration. It was clear to me that there was a need for an economic vehicle

to speak to the concerns and needs of Black people in terms of how well we're doing in business. Even today, 13 years later, there were still only four major publications in the country. It's Ebony Jet Essence in our own book, and Essence started in the same year that we did, which is back in 1970, so at the time that I started, the start of conceptualized Black Enterprise was only Ebony and Jet, and clearly they were not speaking to the kind of concerns that Al Magazine is, how do you make the economic system work for upscale professional Black people? In addition to that, I'd been working for Robert Kennedy for three years, just at the advent of his strategy, definitely just set up my own consulting firm, and it was clear I wanted to expand it beyond our businesses, just being a consulting type of entity, and the idea of the magazine came along, and fortuitously, we were able to borrow the money to get it started, and had the right editorial concept in terms of what was needed in the magazine did indeed take off. Black Enterprise seems to not have any difficulty in finding advertisers, but a lot of the Black publications are having a hard time

and getting the white established companies to advertise in a Black press. To what do you attribute Black Enterprise's success in getting the white advertised to public, to public their ads in your paper? Well, first of all, nothing can be more inaccurate than your statement, and I say that not as an indictment of it, just because it would appear that we have an easy time, and we need to know the probability of the most difficult thing that we find ourselves involved in is nailing down advertising and convincing the majority companies that speak into the audience that we address through the pages of our magazine is something that can be beneficial to them, and obviously to their companies. Historically, white companies have wanted to ignore the importance in the existence of the Black consumer market. One would think that in 1980, as we look at the last quarter of the 20th century, that in fact that would change and turn around, and yet when you look at those companies that are advertising, and either out any of the magazines I named before, Black Enterprise, Ebony Jet, or Essence, you'll still see that they're kind of all in one category.

You don't see camera companies advertising. You don't see air conditioning company advertising. You don't see white goods such as refrigerator companies. You don't see very much clothing, which would not be an album book, but it should be an Ebony. You don't see furniture companies. And so the basic things that you kind of take for credit card companies, the basic things you kind of take for granted, still are not on our books. The major categories of advertising and most black publications are tobacco companies, liquor companies, and auto companies. Now, those companies are clearly important in terms of the basis of solid advertising for any company and publication, but clearly there are many other areas that we are not realizing in terms of the kind of advertising we should have, we will be approaching 300,000 circulation paid by the end of this calendar year. And with the demographics, our audience, being what it is, meaning as upscales it is, we clearly should see from a beneficial business point of view of many of these companies much more advertising. We are real. On the other hand, we will do not amount us to amount a business issue when you measure that against

what we did in our initial first couple of years. Black enterprise have the department segment, but it also has the feature segment, the publisher's page, letters, Washington page, making it, while these particular sections important and how did you come up with the concept to include them in the publication? Well, what you try to do is identify for your readers those areas of concern. We say an issue of black enterprise, we want to have a minimum of two articles that are addressing themselves in some way to each one about readers, meaning that if you have five major features in all of the departments that you are going to have two pieces in the book that somehow speak to the concerns of that particular reader. Whether or not it's where I sent my kids to some of camp, which could be something in a verb section or what do I do with the next 1,000 hours I got back under my internal revenue returns or what kind of second career should I be looking at or what is the first

career to look at or what is the college that I should be looking towards or what computer should I be buying. Those are the kind of subjects that today upscale middle class black Americans are looking to and the department you just described, editorally we have just tried to be on the cutting edge of those things that we found to be of concern to our black consumers and our black readers in terms of speaking to those things which they found important. Black enterprise published the top 100 black businesses across the country. How could you compare that with the Fortune 5, if any? Well, I mean we can see them put together the idea of doing the top 100 and this is that we just completed our 11th year of doing it and it was conceptualized with the idea of showing to the minority community and the black community particular and also the majority community that here's what black businesses were doing. And indeed there was a level of very important business

that was happening within America. There was indeed black on that indeed was representative of the citizenship of this country and that if we started measuring it, if we started measuring it in terms of what it looked like compared to majority business, we could see that clearly given the handicaps that had been in our way that had been great progress that had been made for instance and the top 100 black owned businesses in the country. If you go back 10 years, the total revenues for the top 100 businesses were $473 million. This year when we evaluated that same list, measured the numbers, the top 100 black businesses in the country had reached a level of $2.2 billion in sales and three of those companies, three companies within that 100 had done over $100 million themselves and that means that if you've gone back 10 years ago, those three companies would almost represent a 90% of the total revenues of black business and today you've had that kind of growth. And so clearly there is a role model, I think which is terribly important I think to the black community and also to the white community.

It is important that there be a historical level of there being somewhere in one place, what has happened with minority business in this country and particularly black business and we fortunately have been able to identify that and start to put it in place so that it will be there for posterity. Are these businesses concentrated in the goods and services sector or are we getting to the manufacturing sector in the price? If anything we're moving from a smoke stock economy to a service economy and that's all of America and black business is not much different from that and so when you look at where the businesses are going they're moving in the area as the general market is going into high technology, they're moving into areas having to do with service or any type of businesses that have to do with the basic things such as such as they're moving in the areas such as the basic businesses that provide services while not just on the communications companies you're talking about auto dealerships, you're talking about the kind of businesses

that we historically have been in and I think that you're seeing a healthy change, you're looking at businesses that are involved with energy related services which is terribly important to this country in terms of its growth and so those expansions and those things you see happening in black business have a direct correlation relationship to what one has seen historically in terms of the majority community. Being economists by trade, blacking and priors has gathered a group of black economists to try to focus on the problems of black America. What are some of the things they came up with the problems that affect black America in the 80s? The number one problem facing black America today is unemployment and it's devastating to the point that when you look at our economists and evaluating how bad it was, they have actually said that if we continued in the role we are moving now that we could actually see a disintegration of the black family unit as we know it because you cannot have two generations of people black who have not in fact had employment.

There's no basis for family unity, there's no basis for a sense of belonging, there's no sense of worth in terms of who people are. That's obviously a very dramatic statement to make. It's not overly stated when you have communities in this country, New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, Houston, unemployment levels of 40 to 70 percent and clearly you're looking at a problem which is not a modest problem in terms of how it gets solved and what it is we recognize. Our economists are dealing with not only solutions which they're trying to design which hopefully someone's going to pay attention to, particularly as we come to evaluating the situation in this calendar year, but also making it a thing which the majority community is more aware of and has to be aware because it's so graphically presented to them in terms of the enormity of the problem. It is hard to find words to describe the intensity of emotion and fear. I know that we all share on this crucial issue.

The Black and the Price Board of Economists met again recently to take another look at the number one economic problem facing our nation today. Although our group of experts is no different than any other and that no two economists agree exactly on anything, another important consensus was formed at that meeting. They agree that as this nation's economy changes from a smoke stack economy to a service economy. Blacks especially young blacks will suffer a terribly unfair price unless they're able to obtain the complex skills and knowledge necessary to complete successfully in the world of high technology, in the world of high technology. This is also a crucial concern of our universities, our national organizations and our political leaders,

and obviously our business leaders. You, our young future leaders must also make it one of your primary concerns. It is imperative that you take sufficient science, math and computer courses to prepare yourselves for the high technology revolution that is changing the way our nation lives. I did not say to all of you had to be math and science majors, but I did say that it was possible for you to become part of another minority. A minority that says if you had not taken a computer course by the time you leave high school or certainly by the time you begin college, you will become a computer illiterate. And in the last quarter of the 20th century, those who do not understand computers will find themselves a minority twice, first a minority, and then a computer illiterate.

This brief picture of where we stand today shows us that the path to economic opportunity for all Americans is clearly marked before us. It will not be an easy journey, but we have never been on any easy journeys in the NACP. We will need the commitment of everyone represented in this room, especially our young men and women to travel the distance of this journey. But the journey can and must be made for the sake of our people and for the sake of our nation. If you remember one thought from my address this evening, I hope it will be this. Black Americans have all the political and economic clout they need right now to make America work for all of her citizens. The last fall, our votes made a crucial difference in key elections all across America. This year, the whole world noticed our political strengths in places like Chicago and Philadelphia.

And right now, the voter registration drives being orchestrated by the NACP will make a crucial difference in who becomes the next president of the United States. And this was certainly evidenced today by those who wanted to visit with us and share what their thoughts were. To what do you attribute black and imprised longevity over the last 11 years? Why has it been so successful? I've been publishing it for 13 years and I feel like it's been 70 years, so that's part of it. But I think that we decided early on to design a book that would be something that I use the word book in magazine interchangeably that our readers would find delivered to them a service, solve the metting need in terms of something they wanted to read. It spoke to something they could identify where they could open up the book, spread it out and see some business group of people or some group of professionals and identify with that group because they realized that was them. And I also think we did it in the first class manner.

We set a tone that said we were going to do it well and we're going to do it in a way that we didn't have to apologize for the quality what we're doing. And I think we have a confidence that over the years, if anything, it's gotten better over the years. And I think that's the reason that we find ourselves still continuing to grow and hopefully we will be continuing to grow for many years to come. Why do you think it's important to have a black press? Well, the myriad of problems that face black Americans today. And we didn't, we haven't even talked about the number one problems that face black business people with access to capital. But there's a need to have reporting in the accurate concise way the concerns of black people in this country. And the majority press is clearly not doing that. They're not going to spend the time to do it. They're going to, it's going to be slanted in terms of what they will report. And black, the black press is terribly important to reporting the news and reporting the facts in a way that are going to be relevant to what it is that the black people in this country are all about. And I don't include just magazines at that point. I obviously mean black newspapers. I happen to think that the National Leader, which is obviously the new newspaper that Reagan Henry founded well over a year ago,

and now is in most major cities, is a terribly important newspaper in terms of what is happening. I think that to the extent that they do it and and attempt to serve as the black community, black newspapers in general are important. Their only problem is that they need to pull in advertising. They need to build a circulation. And they obviously need to have the kind of writers that are going to write the quality of articles that are going to make what it is they are saying to their community relevant in the 1983 and beyond. And the problem is that finding that quality a writer because more and more difficult because the writers that used to work for those black news papers now work for our white counterparts has to be a greater fringe benefit, a greater salaries, a greater opportunity. And in many instances black news papers cannot challenge that, which clearly always becomes a problem for any small business in terms of trying to meet the level of what it is the big businesses doing. You mentioned about capital, black businesses, be able to raise enough capital.

Also the SBA, a lot of black businesses are kind of down the SBA. Your particular opinion about the small business administration and blacks been able to raise capital to open businesses. I'm not sure I understand the question, would you mind doing that again? Your impressions of the small business administration and the problem that blacks have in raising capital to start businesses. Well, I think that the black, I think that the SBA, I think it's really said the SBA has some positives and has some negatives. It is very easy always to identify the negatives in a particular situation. I think the SBA, we have to realize we're not designed for the first instance to solve the needs of the terms of black people who are designed to assist small white business people. Because of the civil rights regulations and laws that were passed, we became eligible for all of that which we should have as being citizens of this country. And that included the SBA, it included schools, it included writing and the front of the bus, the back of the bus, all the murid of things that historic had not been opened to us. That included the SBA, included farm bureaus in the light.

The role that agency sets the SBA play, we started to find ourselves taking advantage of the services the SBA offered. In the first instance, it was not done with great enthusiasm. And then within the Nixon administration and the Ford administration, clearly, it started to expand and it became more interested or seemingly concerned about doing that which was concerned. The black business community. After the, and then we went into the card administration, it was a continuation of some of the same. With the advent of the Reagan administration, which is where the surfacing of the whole issue of eight a set of sides which would take too long for us to try to discuss with your listeners today. They started cutting back on those set of sides which had been business earmarked and stated would go to the black business community. It was wrong. It was wrong in principle. It was wrong morally that they do it because the rationale for why they were cutting back was that they had started to create businesses that went beyond the size and scope of what they had initially talked about having.

That was not true. Just not accurate. What they really had done is decided that the conservative, what had really happened is conservative elements within Congress had decided that indeed there was just one more time that they were going to throw a roadblock up in terms of where blacks were going because no one has ever criticized farm subsidies. Farmers in this country have paid not to grow crops or paid the plow back into the ground. Persons who have subsidies in terms of oils, depletion allowances and sorts, those are not indicted. Therefore, what we have done is created a welfare for the well-offer to a certain extent and then when it comes to minority persons as soon as there is some level of catching your breath and not having the grass per straws but holding on to the life raft or being part of the main agenda rather than a side show. And we're told that the parties and the rules have changed and now we're no longer going to be where we are.

The response from the reader surveys that you are probably putting in the black enterprise magazine. We will be saying in our September issue of black enterprise, you're just smarter than we are because you're ahead of us with the coming of question you'd raise. That we have found historically the response of our readers has just been very heartening and very rewarding. We find that they're very incisive, they're very probing, they're very interested, they're very inquisitive in terms of what we're saying and those things we ask them to respond to, whether or not it's a survey but their own likes and dislikes, whether or not it's a contest we've had, whether or not it's about something we've written at a toilet they don't agree with. And for instance, we just did this story in the 10 best cities for blacks to live. And we did not include Detroit is one of those places which was a good place for blacks to live. And we received enormous criticism from the residents of Detroit in terms of why did we not include Detroit in our overall assessment of what we're doing.

So, I mean, it's just difficult too. It is difficult to satisfy everyone but it is still rewarding to know that the responses are there and there is an interest there at a toilet. Earl G. Graves, founder and publisher of Black Enterprise Magazine. If you have a comment or would like to purchase a cassette copy of this program, write us the address is in Black America, Longhorn Radio Network, Austin, Texas, 787-12. For in Black America's technical producer Walter Morgan, I'm John Hanson. Join us next week. You've been listening to in Black America Reflections of the Black Experience in American Society. In Black America is produced and distributed by the Center for Telecommunication Services at UT Austin and does not necessarily reflect the views of the University of Texas at Austin or the station. This is the Longhorn Radio Network.