Harris brings home the bacon for Black-owned banks

The 19th annual National Black Busines Month applauds Vice President Kamala D. Harris and Treasury Secretary Dr. Janet Yellen on the largest investment in capital for Black-owned banks, announced today during the Freedman’s Bank symposium and on  top priorities identified in Pandemic to Prosperity: State of Black Business, 18th edition:Black owned banks, identified in Our10Plan: the African-American economic strategy, as the single most impactful intervention to support Black businesses and homeownership, are among 57 minority depository institutions receiving $3.1 billion in non-dilutive capital or subordinated debt which directly increases their ability to make loans.

• Signing of the Minority Business Act of 2021 as part of the bipartisan infrastructure bill, which makes the Minority Business Development Agency permanent and creates new funding resources and offices around the nation
• Devoting more than $2 billion to carry out the final report of the President’s COVID-19 Health Equity Task Force — $1.2 billion to increase the number of African-American and other underrepresented groups as health practitioners and almost $800 million for community based remediations for the COVID-19 pandemic

“The best way to address inflation, supply chains, and violence is to have these banks making loans to African-American innovators who can move into manufacturing domestically like 31-year-old Freddie Figgers, maker of the only domestically manufactured smart phone, or Derek Peterson, manufacturer of the walk-through respiratory illness scanner or Jerry Ellison, who asssembles for dozens of larger companies in Hartsville, S.C.,” said NBBM Co-founder John William Templeton.  Figgers is featured in a direct mail campaign by American Express in December.  NBBM encourages holiday shoppers to make an impact by purchasing Figgers products at figgers.com

“It is important for Black voters to know that their overwhelming turnouts in 2020 are bearing fruit in unprecedented appropriations,” added Templeton

Yellen said, “In their recent Small Business Credit Survey, the Fed found that while roughly 40 percent of white-owned firms reported receiving all the non-emergency funding they sought last year, the number for Hispanic-owned firms was half that – 21 percent. And for black-owned firms, it was just 13 percent.

Contained in that 13 percent is a woman named Brandi Shelton, who I met a few months ago when I visited her tea shop in Atlanta. Just Add Honey was the name. Brandi owned the shop. She used to own three “Just Add Honeys,” in fact, but during the pandemic, when money was tight, she needed credit to keep her other locations afloat, and no one would give it to her.”

Dr. Susan Elizabeth Ford, special assistant to the President for public health and science, is featured on the cover of the BlackBio100 issue of the Journal of Black Innovation, in preparation for the Journal’s annual scientific proceeding, Innovation&Equity21, on the birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Jan. 15, 2022 in San Francisco.

Journal Publisher  Templeton, author of an upcoming paper for UC-San Francisco–From Freedman’s Hospitals to Omicron: African-Americans and Federal Health Policy, testified twice to the COVID-19 Health Equity Task Force in July and September.  See his presentation at UC-SF at johnwillliamtempleton.com

The annual State of Black Business reports since 2004 have identified manufacturing, life science and health care as the best ways to stimulate economic growth and community renewal in African-American communities.  At Innovation&Equity20 last January, NAFEO President and Counsel Lezli Baskerville called for five new medical schools at HBCUs.  Since then, the California legislature has invested $50 million in Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science in Los Angeles.