The holiday shopping season brings a renewed call to patronize black-owned businesses. But imagine if you and our family decided to buy goods and services exclusively from black-owned shops and professionals for a full year.
In 2009, Maggie and John Anderson of Chicago decided to do just that – and Maggie later chronicled their effort in a book, “Our Black Year: One Family’s Quest to Buy Black in America’s Racially Divided Economy.” Since then she has been traveling the nation with a message of economic empowerment for African Americans.
On Thursday, Anderson comes to Charlotte, a guest of the Charlotte Mecklenburg Black Chamber of Commerce, to continue that important discussion. The event is scheduled from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. at Friendship Missionary Baptist Church. Cost: $20 for those who register by midnight Nov 28.
Anderson, who holds a law degree and MBA, says on her website that her family’s financial experiment and her subsequent book offer “a painful insight into the causes of a people’s economic suffering.”
