Large Growth in Black-Owned Businesses, But Still a Trivial Segment of American Capitalism

JBHE research shows that with the exception of the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, blacks make up 6 percent or less of the students at the nation’s highest-ranked business schools. There has been limited progress in increasing black business school enrollments in recent years.

But black entrepreneurship in the United States continues to grow. The latest report on black-owned businesses from the U.S. Census Bureau shows that in 2002 there were 1.2 million black-owned businesses in the United States, an increase of 45 percent from the previous survey in 1997.

Revenues for all black-owned businesses in 2002 were $89 billion, an increase of 25 percent from 1997.

It must be noted that black business in the United States is still a trivial segment of our economy. In 2002 the revenue of ExxonMobil, just one of thousands of large American corporations, was more than $201 billion, two and half times the revenues of all 1.2 million black-owned businesses combined.

Copyright © 2006. The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education. All rights reserved.