Earl graves biography

American publishing magnate Earl Graves launched his empire in 1972 with Black Enterprise magazine. Coming less than a decade after new U.S.

federal civil rights legislation had been enacted, the magazine soon became the standard-bearer for upwardly mobile African Americans.

Earl Graves was born in Brooklyn, New York, on January 9, 1935, and grew up in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood.

His father worked as a shipping clerk in New York's garment district. Bedford-Stuyvesant, far from the nightclubs and jazz of Harlem, was home to many similar working-class black families.

Earl graves black enterprise

Many owned their own homes, as Graves later pointed out in an interview with Los Angeles Times writer Lee Romney. "I swept the sidewalk once a day and God forbid if I didn't bring the garbage cans in after the garbage had been collected," he recalled.

"From that environment came the idea of wanting to do something of my own… ." Still, entrepreneurship seemed an unlikely aven