Earl G. Graves Sr. gave Black business achievement a publication of its own. Born in Brooklyn on January 9, 1935, he grew up in a household where work ran through everything: his father was assistant manager of a New York garment firm, and his mother led community activities. He entered Morgan State University in 1953 and majored in economics. Selling flowers on campus gave him early practice as a businessman, an arrangement he made because white florists would not deliver to the school.
After graduating, he joined the Army and rose to the rank of captain. He married Barbara Eliza Kydd in 1960, sold real estate in Brooklyn and volunteered during the 1964 Democratic National Convention. That volunteer work led to a job as an administrative assistant to Senator Robert F. Kennedy of New York. When Kennedy was assassinated in 1968, Graves moved to the Small Business Administration and started Earl G. Graves Associates, a consulting firm that advised corporations on urban affairs and economic development.
A newsletter preceded Black Enterprise, whose first magazine issue appeared in August 1970. The Global Business Hall of Fame describes how he assembled an advisory board of Black professionals and sent copies to businesspeople, ministers, politicians and corporate offices. The country gave the magazine its reason to exist: of the roughly three thousand senior executives at major corporations, only three were Black. By the tenth issue, the magazine had attracted corporate advertisers and turned profitable.
The work was shared. Barbara Kydd Graves helped build the company from its beginning. Black Enterprise's account of her career records her service in editorial leadership, circulation and finance. Her responsibilities, the founder's editorial decisions and the practical task of getting an issue into readers' hands all belonged to the same operation.
Black Enterprise covered business ownership, professional advancement and money management. The company later expanded beyond a single magazine into digital media, broadcasting and events. Graves bought the Pepsi-Cola of Washington, D.C., bottling franchise in 1990 and sold it back to its parent company in 1998.
Graves also shared his ideas through the 1997 book How to Succeed in Business Without Being White, which appeared on the New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller lists. He served on corporate boards and the board of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. In 1999, the NAACP awarded him its Spingarn Medal. In 2002, President George W. Bush appointed him to the commission charged with establishing the National Museum of African American History and Culture.
Graves died on April 6, 2020, at 85. Morgan State had opened the Earl G. Graves School of Business and Management in 2015, and his son Earl Graves Jr. had led Black Enterprise as chief executive since 2006. The publication he founded remained part of the record of Black American enterprise.
