Venita Cooper, founder of Silhouette Sneakers & Art in the Greenwood area of Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Parnia Mazhar| NBC News.
TULSA — Nestled among rows of colorful shoes lining the walls of Silhouette Sneakers & Art, a framed black-and-white photograph reminds owner Venita Cooper of the giants on whose shoulders she stands.
Overlaid on this image is the company’s name, Grier Shoe Shop, and its address — which is part of an area known as Black Wall Street. It was the business that occupied the Cooper building before it was destroyed during the Tulsa race massacre more than a century ago.
In the decades between Grier and Silhouette, there have been several waves of black entrepreneurship in the area, local advocates said. They have been particularly excited by the focus on innovation and technology in the latest renaissance, which was supercharged after the 2020 racial assessment galvanized corporate and social interest in Black American upliftment.
“We’re trying to revitalize the space, build successful businesses down here — and take back what was taken from us,” Cooper said in an interview.
Cooper also runs an artificial intelligence platform for the footwear resale market called Arbit. With these ventures, they are part of a growing class of black entrepreneurs who are drawing on Tulsa’s history for inspiration and resources for support.
He went through Act House, an accelerator program for entrepreneurs of color. The program provides a $70,000 investment with no interest or equity requirements, and non-local participants relocate to Oklahoma’s second-largest city to work with peers and other professionals.
Difficult story
Bringing participants to Tulsa for several months can help them see how they fit into the bigger picture of minority entrepreneurship, said Act House founder Dominick Ard’is. Some who weren’t already in the community have stayed beyond the accelerator’s conclusion, adding their fledgling businesses to the growing ecosystem of minority-owned companies in the area.
Act House is part of a collective of organizations aimed at supporting black-owned businesses in Tulsa, a mission these stakeholders see as especially important given the city’s storied history.
Dominick Ard’is, founder of Accelerator Act House in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Parnia Mazhar| NBC News.
The Greenwood District, as Black Wall Street is more formally known, was was attacked by a white mob on May 31, 1921, an event that would later be recognized as one of the worst racial massacres in American history. Over 1,000 businesses and homes were raided and 300 blacks were killed as the mob torched the neighborhood.
That story gained new attention after the killing of George Floyd in 2020 and the 100th anniversary of the massacre in 2021. Outside of Tulsa, advocates say some corporate interest in supporting black businesses has waned in recent years as interest rates and economic uncertainty increased.
But within the local community, groups continue to try to rebuild what was lost by empowering the next generation of entrepreneurs. One way disparate efforts among stakeholders have come together to better serve founders is through Build In Tulsa, a network of companies like accelerators and investors.
Build In Tulsa CEO Ashli Sims said she’s seen more recognition of Tulsa as an emerging tech hot spot and a clearer understanding of why it’s important for black entrepreneurs to go there, given the history. Sims, who grew up in the city, said there is an effort to combat the idea that people have to leave to find the success that was once ubiquitous on Black Wall Street.
“I want young, black kids growing up in Tulsa, Oklahoma, to look around and see tech startups, I want them to see CEOs, I want them to see founders, I want them to see innovators,” Sims said. “I want them to see wealth and I want them to know that this is part of their future.”
For entrepreneurs, Sims said that means they don’t have to move to a coastal city to take their venture to the next level.
Shoes displayed on a wall at Silhouette Sneakers & Art in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Parnia Mazhar| NBC News.
Build In Tulsa recently opened a space for entrepreneurs of color to collaborate and meet. The three-story building is located at the corner of North Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue. alleged ties in the Ku Klux Klan.
This physical community in Tulsa was paramount to founders like Edna Martinson, whose company, Boddle, offers 3D toys for children that encourage learning. Through Tulsa, the Act House alum now feels part of the national black entrepreneurship space and finds herself with more connections at popular owner events like Art Basel in Miami and South by Southwest in Austin.
“It’s not just like an island of Tulsa per se,” Martinson said. “It’s really like a gateway to the larger national community of color founders and ecosystem builders.”
Funding challenges
Despite the progress, advocates and entrepreneurs are quick to note that the patchwork of organizations offering support doesn’t eliminate the disparities facing Black founders across the country. The biggest obstacle that many pointed out is the difficulty of obtaining financing.
Inequalities exist at every stage. ONE Stanford Study 2016 found that black entrepreneurs start with about $500 in outside equity capital, while their white counterparts have $18,500. Although the dollar amounts are modest for both groups, the National Bureau of Economic Research reported that startups saw five times more capital from family and other connoisseurs than those owned by Blacks.
Black founders received just 0.48% of venture capital dollars in 2023, according to Crunchbase. And traditional financing measures are hampered by practices like personal collateral requirements that make it harder for those without generational wealth.
“It’s literally exhausting,” said LaTanya White, founder of Concept Creative Group, a firm focused on business development and wealth transfer among black founders. “All the while, you’re still trying to build a business, you’re still trying to build something that will open doors for generations in your family and in your community.”
These challenges add to an already dire picture of the state of equality in business. Less than 3 percent of American businesses were owned by blacks, despite the fact that the racial group makes up more than 12 percent of the nation’s population, according to the most recent federal data analyzed by CNBC.
Olaoluwa Adesanya is one of those entrepreneurs who struggle with funding. While he found reluctance from venture capitalists to invest in hardware-focused tech companies, Adesanya was able to get financial help from a number of groups focused on founding founders of color.
In addition to being part of Act House, he has received tens of thousands of dollars from programs such as AfroTech and a competition for Black founders at Harvard Business School. He also won a grant from a Black Wall Street organization.
Adesanya said both monetary and community support in Tulsa has been instrumental in improving PalmPlug, his product for improving hand mobility. Before he came to gas, Adesanya had a prototype that he was constantly worried was going to break. Now, it often receives compliments on its design and quality.
“It’s still very difficult,” said Adesanya, who is back in Seattle but is considering a permanent move to Tulsa. “But I’m also extremely grateful for the Black community and how they really helped us get to where we are today.”
There’s also evidence that Black founders have a harder time winning government grants or contracts, said Grant Warner, director of the Center for Black Entrepreneurship, a partnership between two historically black colleges and the Black Economic Alliance Foundation. He said one of the most obvious cases he has seen was an identical application for a government award that was only approved after the white man’s name was changed to go before the black man’s name.
“Dreams of our ancestors”
Entrepreneurship can seem especially dangerous for blacks as they try to maintain their families’ financial status, according to James Lowry, author of two books on minority wealth. That’s partly due to a reluctance to sacrifice the security that previous generations had gained during the foray into corporate America, he said.
Black people don’t always have the luxury that some other racial groups have of seeing role models in their communities with people who have successfully started their own companies, he said. Still, Lowry said he’s excited to see more black students attending business schools and thinking about creating big ventures.
“It’s like starting slow and competing with generations of people who have been entrepreneurs, even within their own family,” said Lowry, who is also a senior adviser on workforce and supply chain diversity at the Boston Consulting Group. “It’s a catchup, but we’re moving on.”
The Black Wall Street mural in the Greenwood area of Tulsa, Oklahoma, on Friday, June 19, 2020. Greenwood, known as Black Wall Street, was one of the most prosperous African-American enclaves in the US before it was burned down by a white mob in 1921.
Christopher Creese | Bloomberg via Getty Images
On a national scale, advocates see the potential for government programs to help level the playing field for founders of color. For example, the Uplift Act would provide resources to create business incubators on the campuses of historically Black and minority-serving universities, as well as at community colleges. The Minority Business Development Agency’s Capital Readiness Program helps disadvantaged entrepreneurs scale their businesses, but the program took more than 1,000 applications for less than 50 seats.
Black entrepreneurs and stakeholders point to resilience as a key attribute that helps founders succeed despite these unique obstacles. In fact, academic models have found that women and minority founders show higher levels of resilience due to a combination of challenges and support structures.
For Adesanya and others who have come to Tulsa, they can see and feel the refusal to give up in the face of adversity from those who came before them.
From sidewalk markers pointing to businesses that existed before the massacre, to the museum dedicated to the history of Black Wall Street, reminders of the past helped these founders better understand where they fit into a long legacy. And it inspires them, they say, to break down barriers for themselves and those who will follow.
“We are truly the dreams of our ancestors,” Adesanya said. “What we do is what they dreamed and suffered for.”
— NBC’s Shaquille Brewster, Parnia Mazhar and Andrew Davis contributed to this report.
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