ABOUT
The Black Business Honors, founded in 2016 by Larry W. Robinson, is an Award Celebration designed to honor local owners and employees of Black businesses as well as encourage an entrepreneurial spirit and networking in the Black community.
​
Larry W. Robinson, is an award winning syndicated media personality, has been serving the Gospel music community for over 20 years. He currently has a radio feature titled "Gospel Updates" airing on numerous stations around the world. Larry is the publisher of a web site and digital magazine with the same name. Over 20 years ago, Larry founded and is the executive producer of The Original Gospel Music Honors, an awards celebration designed to honor local citizens for their contributions to Gospel Music. He is also an author and speaker whose passion is to help Humanity embrace and experience God's love in a tangible way everyday!
HISTORY OF BLACK BUSINESSES
African-American businesses, also known as black owned businesses or black businesses, can be traced back to when Africans were first forcibly brought to North American in the 17th century. Many African Americans who gained their own freedom out of slavery opened their own businesses, and even some enslaved African Americans were able to operate their own businesses, either as skill tradespeople or as minor traders and peddlers. Enslaved African Americans operated businesses both with and without their owners' permission.
Emancipation and civil rights permitted businessmen to operate inside the American legal structure starting in the Reconstruction Era (1863–77) and afterwards. By the 1890s, thousands of small business operations had opened in urban areas. The most rapid growth came in the early 20th century, As the increasingly rigid Jim Crow system of segregation moved urban blacks into a community large enough to support a business establishment. The National Negro Business League, Promoted by college president Booker T. Washington the League opened over 600 chapters, reaching every city with a significant black population.
By 1920, there were tens of thousands of black businesses, the great majority of them quite small. The largest were insurance companies. The League had grown so large that it supported numerous offshoots, including the National Negro Bankers Association, the National Negro Press Association, the National Association of Negro Funeral Directors, the National Negro Bar Association, the National Association of Negro Insurance Men, the National Negro Retail Merchants' Association, the National Association of Negro Real Estate Dealers, and the National Negro Finance Corporation.[1]The Great Depression of 1929-39 was a serious blow, as cash income fell in the black community because of unemployment, and many smaller businesses close down. During World War II many employees can indeed owners switched over to high-paying jobs in munitions factories. Black businessmen generally were more conservative elements of their community, but typically did support the civil rights movement. By the 1970s, federal programs to promote minority business activity provided new funding, although the opening world of mainstream management attracted a great deal of talent. Click: http://bit.ly/blackownedbusinesseshistory for more.