Race and Ethnicity

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    ‘Black Capitalism’ Promised a Better City for Everyone. What Happened?

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    ROCHESTER, N.Y. — The Panther Graphics printing plant sits along a row of red brick buildings and empty parking lots on the edge of a circular highway that separates this city’s downtown from a largely Black neighborhood to the north. Nearby, there is a warehouse, a Baptist Church and a billboard that warns “A Shot from A Gun Can’t Be Undone,” a reference to Rochester’s soaring murder rate.Tony Jackson, the owner of Panther Graphics, grew up here, the oldest of six children. His mother died when he was 13 and his father served time in Attica, the nearby state prison. But Mr. Jackson said he always had “ink in his blood” — a helpful trait in a city dominated by the giant film and copying companies Kodak and Xerox — and he found his calling in commercial printing.Mr. Jackson named his company, which produces labels for the grocery chain Wegmans and health care enrollment packets for Blue Cross Blue Shield, after the Black Panther Party. “It represents being Black and being strong,” he said.Today, in Mr. Jackson’s office, there is a photo of his son breaking a tackle as a running back on the Duke University football team and also a large painting of four men — Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Nelson Mandela and Barack Obama — gathered around a table, smiling.“I have always wanted people in this neighborhood to see what is possible,” he said.But Panther Graphics is the product of a complicated legacy. The company is one of the few sizable, Black-owned employers operating in Rochester, a city of 200,000 people, 40 percent of whom are Black.There was a time, though, when Rochester was on the cutting edge of Black “community capitalism” — an effort to create companies owned, staffed and managed largely by Black people that could lift up the broader community.Just as giant corporations have pledged billions to help combat racism and support Black Americans in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, corporate investments in Black businesses were seen as an antidote to racial unrest in the 1960s, a way to ease the tensions that threatened the reputations of burgeoning corporate hubs like Rochester.Some of those efforts in Rochester were quite bold and innovative at the time. Looking back now though, the long term challenges of achieving those ambitions shows the limits of social activists partnering with big business and how such efforts may not make a substantial dent in the systemic issues of poverty and racism affecting the broader Black community. It is a disheartening case study for the many companies that have made public commitments to promote equity and inclusion this year.Nearly 60 years ago, Xerox teamed up with a Black power group to create a factory that made vacuums and other parts for copying and film processing and was partly owned by its work force.For decades, Kodak and Xerox — both with large operations in Rochester — dominated the city’s business landscape.Recently, Rochester has dealt with a rising murder rate and municipal unrest.That company, which was eventually called Eltrex Industries, provided hundreds of manufacturing jobs to Black residents, including Mr. Jackson, who credits his experience there with providing the skills and connections he needed to start his own business.As part of an effort to promote more racial equity, Xerox also recruited Black engineers and technicians to Rochester, including Ursula Burns, who rose to become the first Black woman to lead a Fortune 500 company as chief executive officer.Eventually, Eltrex shut its doors in 2011. Its challenges were blamed on a mixture of racism and its reliance on winning contracts from Xerox and Kodak, which were fighting for their own survival in a digital age and whose ability to support the venture became more limited.Some community leaders say the company and its corporate sponsors veered from its mission by focusing on profit while shedding its Black activist identity.“With as many corporate entities as Rochester has, you wouldn’t think it would have such a large poor Black population,” said Dennis Bassett, a former executive at Kodak and Bausch + Lomb, who is Black and moved to Rochester in the 1970s.That contrast seems even more stark these days, after a particularly tumultuous time for the city, which is the nation’s third poorest, by one measure, after Detroit and Cleveland.Lovely Warren, the first woman and second African American to be the city’s mayor, was indicted in July on weapons charges after her 10-year-old child was left alone in her home where police found a pistol and rifle. Ms. Warren pleaded not guilty.The city was also roiled last year by the death of a Black man, Daniel Prude, who was handcuffed on a frigid street by Rochester police officers and had a mesh hood put over his head because they said he was having a psychotic episode. Video of the confrontation, which led to Mr. Prude’s death, came out months later, prompting protests in Rochester. In February, the police pepper-sprayed a nine-year-old Black girl at her home, setting off more protests that joined a larger national conversation about race and policing.The widespread protests throughout the country led corporate America to pledge billions of dollars in investments to Black-owned businesses and to ramp up hiring of African Americans.But following through may be a challenge, the way likeit was in Rochester.Tony Jackson owns Panther Graphics, one of the few sizable, Black-owned companies in Rochester.Malik Evans, who won the Democratic nomination for mayor, said the city needs to create more small- and medium-size businesses.Despite decades of investments, Eltrex failed to grow to its fullest potential and spawn a large number of other community-owned companies as many had hoped it would.“This could have been the nation’s first billion dollar Black-owned business and the start of many others,” Mr. Jackson said of Eltrex. “But it failed to adapt.”‘We wanted a factory’When the head of Xerox Joseph Wilson drove up to the headquarters of the organization in 1964, the Rev. Franklin Florence remembers there was still smoke in the air from the protests erupting around Rochester over the lack of affordable housing for Black people.The F.I.G.H.T. organization was an umbrella group made up of Black churches, tenant associations and even book clubs that used their collective strength to organize protests around any issue affecting the membership.Many of Rochester’s corporate leaders were shaken by the protests, but it was Mr. Wilson who took the step in 1964 of reaching out to Mr. Florence, the head of F.I.G.H.T. — short for Freedom, Independence, God, Honor, Today — to ask how Xerox could help.“Joseph Wilson asked what we wanted,” Mr. Florence recalled in an interview. “We told him we wanted a factory.”Mr. Florence had gained national attention during the civil rights movement with his campaign against Eastman Kodak, the city’s largest and most influential company, which had employed relatively few Black residents.He was a polarizing figure in Rochester who led protests at Kodak’s annual shareholder meeting, an embarrassment to the founding Eastman family and a warning to other companies about the power of social activism to disrupt their businesses.Eltrex’s original factory building was torn down a decade ago after a vehicle smashed into the first floor and burst into flames.A photo of the Rev. Franklin Florence at Central Church of Christ. He gained national attention in the early days of the civil rights movement with his campaign against Eastman Kodak.Mr. Wilson of Xerox assigned one of his executives in Europe to set up the plant. The company that would run it would be called Fighton.Some of Fighton’s first products were vacuums and parts for electrical transformers. A portion of the company was owned by the employees and the rest by the F.I.G.H.T. organization which ran a neighborhood housing project called F.I.G.H.T. Village, near the factory. Xerox lent managers to help train the workers.Among the efforts to support Black business amid the unrest of the 1960s, Fighton represented something new.“They wanted to try capitalism, but they wanted it to happen in a socialist way,’’ said Laura Warren Hill, a history professor at Bloomfield College in New Jersey, and the author of “Strike the Hammer: The Black Freedom Struggle in Rochester, NY 1940-1970.” “They wanted it to have a human face and to help the underserved.”The role of the city’s big corporations in this initiative also stood out.“You have Xerox working with a Black power group,” Ms. Hill said, “to shape what Black capitalism is going to look like.”Matt Augustine, Eltrex’s longest serving chief executive, said his approach to hiring was to give employees first and often “second chances.”Changing leadership and a nameOutside of Rochester, though, Fighton was not always so well received. The name seemed to be a big part of its problem.“The people we were trying to do business with would ask ‘What does this Fight mean? Fight who?’” recalled Matthew Augustine, the company’s longest serving chief executive.In 1976, Mr. Augustine was recruited to become C.E.O. by a friend from Harvard Business School who was on the board of Fighton.The F.I.G.H.T. organization had gone through an internal power struggle, with Mr. Florence eventually losing his leadership role. At the time, the factory was not profitable and in danger of shutting down, Mr. Augustine said.The Fighton board wanted Mr. Augustine, a native of Louisiana, to shift the business model to be “more personal profit orientated” and less focused on the community benefit, he said.Residents of F.I.G.H.T. Village, a housing project near where the old Eltrex factory stood.The board agreed to give Mr. Augustine ownership of most of the company and he eventually amassed an 80 percent stake.One of his first moves was changing the company’s name from Fighton, which was seen as too militant in the business community, to Eltrex Industries — a mashup of Electrical, Transformer and Xerox.In addition to manufacturing, the rebranded company started selling office supplies and offering snow removal and mail processing services. Under Mr. Augustine’s watch, Eltrex was meant to be a one-stop shop for companies seeking to fulfill their minority-owned business goals.Mr. Augustine said his approach to hiring was to give many employees first and often “second chances.” Some workers were still incarcerated and came to and from the factory from jail each day.Rochester had other Black-owned businesses but many tended to be restaurants, barbershops and other service-focused enterprises. At its height, Eltrex employed 350 people, mostly Black and Hispanic workers, in “prideful jobs” Mr. Augustine said. It generated $20 million in sales and was profitable.Kodak, which had been initially reluctant to get involved because of its contentious relationship with the F.I.G.H.T. organization, also agreed to do business with Eltrex, Mr. Augustine said.Despite it financial success, Mr. Florence’s son Clifford Florence said Eltrex was straying from its original mission.“They lost sight of the advocacy that they should be doing for the poor and began to look at the money,” he said.Mr. Jackson went to work at Eltrex in the late 1980s. He got the opportunity to supervise employees and to work in sales, where he made valuable connections. He looked enviously at Mr. Augustine’s office, his Mercedes and house in the suburbs. “That’s what inspired me to start my own business,” Mr. Jackson said.In 1993, Mr. Jackson left Eltrex to start Panther Graphics. One of his biggest accounts came from Xerox. In a few years, Mr. Jackson also had a house in the suburbs and a cabin on Lake Ontario with a pontoon boat.Several years ago, Mr. Jackson drove his Porsche to visit a friend in north Rochester and handed him cash to buy them beer. A few minutes later, the police surrounded Mr. Jackson and his sports car. An officer threatened to search him, suggesting that the cash was for a drug deal. The police eventually left, he said, but did not apologize for their mistake.“I am not going to cry about it because what good does that do?” Mr. Jackson said.‘I bit my tongue more than I wish’In her memoir published in June, Ms. Burns describes how the very top executives at Xerox and the longtime board member Vernon Jordan mentored her throughout her career. She praised Mr. Wilson, who is credited with founding Xerox, for taking an “enlightened” approach to diversity.Some community leaders say the Eltrex company and its corporate sponsors veered from their mission by focusing on profit and deliberately shedding its Black activist identity.“Why is it that we have none of these people working here?” Mr. Wilson said, according to Ms. Burns’s book. Mr. Wilson remarked that he could not run a “great company” where Black people and women he saw outside his window were “literally not here.”While Mr. Wilson and other executives set a supportive tone at the top, these efforts by Xerox and the city’s other large companies did not always change attitudes across the broader Rochester community, some local leaders say. Ms. Burns, who is retired from Xerox, declined to comment.Eltrex was regularly recognized with awards for the quality of its products. Yet, Mr. Augustine would hear rumblings from people in the local business community about the need to improve quality control at Eltrex.Eltrex was also paying a higher interest rate than other companies — something Mr. Augustine learned after he was appointed to the board of a local bank.“People ask, ‘Why weren’t you a billion dollar company?,” said Mr. Augustine. “But they don’t understand the environment we were operating in.”“When you hear about the folks burning down Black Wall Street. This stuff is real. There are people who are absolutely threatened by any kinds of success for Black people and they work to keep you from being successful.”Dennis Bassett spent 50 years in corporate America, including at Kodak and Bausch + Lomb. He wishes the companies would have done more to help the city.Dennis Bassett spent 18 years at Kodak and 17 at Bausch + Lomb. He remembers flying with a top Kodak’s executive on the corporate jet, talking about the need for more diversity. Kodak “did a good job putting people of color in executive positions,” Mr. Bassett said.But those hiring initiatives did not always reach down into the company’s middle management, where many key decisions were made, he said.And even as Xerox and Kodak “were printing money,” the city’s poorest Black residents continued to slide further into poverty, he said. Mr. Bassett faults himself for not pushing the companies to do more to help the city.“Back then, I was chasing the brass ring,” said Mr. Bassett, 73. “I was doing the things I needed to be successful for my career and my family.“I look back and say I bit my tongue more than I wish I had bit my tongue,” he added.In a statement, a Xerox spokesperson said the company has spent millions over many decades supporting science programs for Rochester students and organizing mentorships and other volunteer activities to “help close the poverty gap.”“Giving back to communities throughout the world, particularly underserved communities, is ingrained in our company’s values,” the spokesperson said.Kodak did not respond to requests for comment.Mr. Bassett faced some barriers in Rochester that seemed intractable.Mr. Bassett remembers that when he put his five-bedroom house in an upscale Rochester suburb on the market in the 1980s, the realtor recommended that he take down all the family pictures or any artwork that could indicate that a Black family lived there.“The realtor was matter-of-fact,” Mr. Bassett said. “And guess what? We complied. I just wanted to sell my house.”Clifford Florence, a minister at Central Church of Christ in Rochester, has been trying to get Plymouth Avenue, on which his church resides, named after his father, the Rev. Franklin Florence.A new mayorRochester will have a new mayor in January, most likely a City Council member named Malik Evans.Mr. Evans, who defeated Ms. Warren in the Democratic primary this summer, said the city needs to let go of its identity as a company town dominated by Kodak and Xerox, and become a “town of companies.”“We have older African American residents who had graduated from high school and were getting jobs at Bausch + Lomb and Kodak, and then buying property,” said Mr. Evan. “But then that fizzled.”Mr. Evans said the city should focus on creating more small- and medium-size businesses and that corporate commitments cannot fade as the protests against racism recede.“It can’t become just another flavor of the month,’’ he said. “We always look back a few years later and say, ‘Whatever happened to that.’”A statue of Frederick Douglass, who escaped slavery and became a prominent Black abolitionist. He lived in Rochester for 25 years and was buried there.A mural called “I Am Speaking” featuring John Lewis in downtown Rochester. It was painted by local artists and based on a photograph by the Civil Rights era photographer Danny Lyon.Mural painted by Ephraim Gebre, Darius Dennis, Jared Diaz and Dan HarringtonA forgotten legacyToday, there are no grand monuments to Franklin Florence or the company he helped create. Eltrex’s original factory building was damaged in 2010 after a vehicle smashed into the first floor and burst into flames. The vehicle’s occupants were killed in the crash and the building was demolished.“If you walk down the street in Rochester, not many people know who Franklin Florence is, and I think that is a crime,” said Ms. Hill, the historian. “Whether you love or hate him, he is an important figure.”Even today, there is debate about Eltrex’s legacy. Mr. Augustine, the former C.E.O., said he regretted that he was not able to grow the company’s customer base before Xerox and Kodak began to struggle. But he often found that other companies were not sincerely interested in engaging Black-owned businesses, but only looking like they were.Kodak filed for bankruptcy in 2012., while Xerox restructured its business which resulted in a series of large lay offs at its Rochester facilities. Mr. Augustine said some of Eltrex’s assets were sold and its employees transferred to Cannon Industries, a metal fabricator and one of the other large minority-owned businesses in Rochester.“Could we have done more? Yes,” said Mr. Augustine. “But I am proud of what we accomplished.”Mr. Jackson said Eltrex failed to adapt to life beyond Kodak and Xerox and its problems should not be blamed on racism. “I have to reinvent myself every five years or I die,” he said.For his part, Franklin Florence said he had hoped the original concept of Fighton could have been expanded. He urged the protesters who are pushing to end systemic racism today to keep up the pressure.“There were people back then who said we had to get out of the street and into the boardroom,’’ Mr. Florence said. “Our folk went into the boardrooms and we suffered. And that is where we are today.”Malik Evans, a City Council member, said Rochester needs to let go of its identity as a company town dominated by Kodak and Xerox, and become a “town of companies.” More

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    Who Discriminates in Hiring? A New Study Can Tell.

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    Applications seemingly from Black candidates got fewer replies than those evidently from white candidates. The method could point to specific companies.Twenty years ago, Kalisha White performed an experiment. A Marquette University graduate who is Black, she suspected that her application for a job as executive team leader at a Target in Wisconsin was being ignored because of her race. So she sent in another one, with a name (Sarah Brucker) more likely to make the candidate appear white.Though the fake résumé was not quite as accomplished as Ms. White’s, the alter ego scored an interview. Target ultimately paid over half a million dollars to settle a class-action lawsuit brought by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission on behalf of Ms. White and a handful of other Black job applicants.Now a variation on her strategy could help expose racial discrimination in employment across the corporate landscape.Economists at the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Chicago this week unveiled a vast discrimination audit of some of the largest U.S. companies. Starting in late 2019, they sent 83,000 fake job applications for entry-level positions at 108 companies — most of them in the top 100 of the Fortune 500 list, and some of their subsidiaries.Their insights can provide valuable evidence about violations of Black workers’ civil rights.The researchers — Patrick Kline and Christopher Walters of Berkeley and Evan K. Rose of Chicago — are not ready to reveal the names of companies on their list. But they plan to, once they expose the data to more statistical tests. Labor lawyers, the E.E.O.C. and maybe the companies themselves could do a lot with this information. (Dr. Kline said they had briefed the U.S. Labor Department on the general findings.)In the study, applicants’ characteristics — like age, sexual orientation, or work and school experience — varied at random. Names, however, were chosen purposefully to ensure applications came in pairs: one with a more distinctive white name — Jake or Molly, say — and the other with a similar background but a more distinctive Black name, like DeShawn or Imani.What the researchers found would probably not surprise Ms. White: On average, applications from candidates with a “Black name” get fewer callbacks than similar applications bearing a “white name.”This aligns with a paper published by two economists from the University of Chicago a couple of years after Ms. White’s tussle with Target: Respondents to help-wanted ads in Boston and Chicago had much better luck if their name was Emily or Greg than if it was Lakisha or Jamal. (Marianne Bertrand, one of the authors, testified as an expert witness in the trial over Ms. White’s discrimination claim.)This experimental approach with paired applications, some economists argue, offers a closer representation of racial discrimination in the work force than studies that seek to relate employment and wage gaps to other characteristics — such as educational attainment and skill — and treat discrimination as a residual, or what’s left after other differences are accounted for.The Berkeley and Chicago researchers found that discrimination isn’t uniform across the corporate landscape. Some companies discriminate little, responding similarly to applications by Molly and Latifa. Others show a measurable bias.All told, for every 1,000 applications received, the researchers found, white candidates got about 250 responses, compared with about 230 for Black candidates. But among one-fifth of companies, the average gap grew to 50 callbacks. Even allowing that some patterns of discrimination could be random, rather than the result of racism, they concluded that 23 companies from their selection were “very likely to be engaged in systemic discrimination against Black applicants.”There are 13 companies in automotive retailing and services in the Fortune 500 list. Five are among the 10 most discriminatory companies on the researchers’ list. Of the companies very likely to discriminate based on race, according to the findings, eight are federal contractors, which are bound by particularly stringent anti-discrimination rules and could lose their government contracts as a consequence.“Discriminatory behavior is clustered in particular firms,” the researchers wrote. “The identity of many of these firms can be deduced with high confidence.”The researchers also identified some overall patterns. For starters, discriminating companies tend to be less profitable, a finding consistent with the proposition by Gary Becker, who first studied discrimination in the workplace in the 1950s, that it is costly for firms to discriminate against productive workers.The study found no strong link between discrimination and geography: Applications for jobs in the South fared no worse than anywhere else. Retailers and restaurants and bars discriminate more than average. And employers with more centralized personnel operations handling job applications tend to discriminate less, suggesting that uniform rules and procedures across a company can help reduce racial biases.An early precedent for the paper published this week is a 1978 study that sent pairs of fake applications with similar qualifications but different photos, showing a white or a Black applicant. Interestingly, that study found some evidence of “reverse” discrimination against white applicants.More fake-résumé studies have followed in recent years. One found that recent Black college graduates get fewer callbacks from potential employers than white candidates with identical resumes. Another found that prospective employers treat Black graduates from elite universities about the same as white graduates of less selective institutions.One study reported that when employers in New York and New Jersey were barred from asking about job candidates’ criminal records, callbacks to Black candidates dropped significantly, relative to white job seekers, suggesting employers assumed Black candidates were more likely to have a record.What makes the new research valuable is that it shows regulators, courts and labor lawyers how large-scale auditing of hiring practices offers a method to monitor and police bias. “Our findings demonstrate that it is possible to identify individual firms responsible for a substantial share of racial discrimination while maintaining a tight limit on the expected number of false positives encountered,” the researchers wrote.Individual companies might even use the findings to reform their hiring practices.Dr. Kline of Berkeley said Jenny R. Yang, a former chief commissioner of the E.E.O.C. and the current director of the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs, which has jurisdiction over federal contractors, had been apprised of the findings and had expressed interest in the researchers’ technique. (A representative of the agency declined to comment or to make Ms. Yang available.)Similar tests have been performed since the 1980s to detect discrimination in housing by real estate agents and rental property owners. Tests in which white and nonwhite people inquire about the availability of housing suggest discrimination remains rampant.Deploying this approach in the labor market has proved a bit tougher. Last year, the New York City Commission on Human Rights performed tests to detect employment discrimination — whether by race, gender, age or any other protected class — at 2,356 shops. Still, “employment is always harder than housing,” said Sapna Raj, deputy commissioner of the law enforcement bureau at the agency, which enforces anti-discrimination regulations.“This could give us a deeper understanding,” Ms. Raj said of the study by the Berkeley and Chicago researchers. “What we would do is evaluate the information and look proactively at ways to address it.”The commission, she noted, could not take action based on the kind of statistics in the new study on their own. “There are so many things you have to look at before you can determine that it is discrimination,” she argued. Still, she suggested, statistical analysis could alert her to which employers it makes sense to look at.And that could ultimately convince corporations that discrimination is costly. “This is actionable evidence of illegal behavior by huge firms,” Dr. Walters of Berkeley said on Twitter in connection with the study’s release. “Modern statistical methods have the potential to help detect and redress civil rights violations.” More

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    The Travel Industry’s Reckoning With Race and Inclusion

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    Tourists, particularly Black travelers, are paying close attention to how destinations and travel service providers approach diversity and equity after a year of social justice protests.Between the Covid-19 pandemic, which brought tourism to a near-complete halt for months on end, and last summer’s protests for social justice, the past year has been one of reckoning for the travel industry on issues of race and inclusivity.In the wake of George Floyd’s killing, everybody from hotel operators to luggage makers declared themselves allies of the protesters. At a time when few people were traveling, Instagram posts and pledges to diversify were easy to make. But now, as travel once again picks up, the question of how much travel has really changed has taken on new urgency.“From the very emergence of the Covid pandemic and especially in the wake of uprisings last summer, there’s a question about place,” said Paul Farber, the director of Monument Lab, a Pennsylvania-based public art and history studio that works with cities and states that want to examine, remove or add historic monuments. “What is the relationship of people and places? Where are sites of belonging? Where are sites where historic injustices may be physically or socially marked?”Monument Lab is one of several organizations, groups and individuals trying to change the way travelers of all colors understand America’s racially fraught history. Urging people to engage with history beyond museums and presentations from preservation societies is one approach.In turn, many travelers are paying close attention to whether companies are following through with their promises from last year. Black travelers, in particular, are doubling down on supporting Black-owned businesses. A survey released earlier this year by the consulting firm MMGY Global found that Black travelers, particularly those in the United States, Canada, Britain and Ireland, are keenly interested in how destinations and travel service providers approach diversity and have indicated that it has an influence on their travel decision-making.At Monument Lab, questions about belonging, inclusion and how history memorializes different people were coming up frequently over the past year, Mr. Farber said, particularly from travelers looking to learn about Confederate and other monuments while road tripping.In response, Monument Lab, which examines the meaning of monuments, created an activity guide called Field Trip, which allows people to pause on their trips to learn about specific monuments. On a worksheet, participants are prompted to question who created the monuments, why they were made and what they represent.The statue of Nathan Bedford Forrest, a slave trader, Confederate general and Ku Klux Klan leader, was removed from Health Sciences Park in Memphis, Tenn. in 2017. Like many other monuments in the United States, it had become a polarizing presence. Yalonda M. James/The Commercial Appeal, via Associated PressIn creating Field Trip, it became clear to Mr. Farber that there is a strong interest from travelers to learn about Black history. This sentiment is echoed by tour operators who offer Civil Rights and other social-justice-oriented tours like those focusing on the contributions of Black Americans, women and figures in the L.G.B.T.Q. community.“There are a lot of white people who for the first time have had a conversation about racial justice and maybe even heard the words ‘systemic racism’ for the first time,” said Rebecca Fisher, founder of Beyond the Bell Tours, a Philadelphia-based operator of social-justice-oriented tours that highlight marginalized communities, people and histories. “People heard the new words and now they want to learn. That doesn’t mean that it is backed up with results, but I am seeing a trend in interest.”On a tour with Beyond the Bell guests might, for example, participants hear about Philadelphia’s President’s House, but they’ll also hear about Ona Judge, an enslaved woman who escaped from George Washington’s home, and about the former president’s efforts to recapture her. One of the company’s most popular tours focuses on gay history in the city.Seeking Black-owned travel businessesBlack travelers, in particular, are increasingly looking for ways to show their support for Black-owned travel businesses.Even as the family road trip has made a comeback in the wake of the coronavirus, that sort of trip hasn’t been a source of unfettered freedom for generations of Black motorists because of Jim Crow laws enforcing racial segregation in America. And now, after a year in which protests of the police killings of Black people amplified the perils of skin color, Black travelers are seeking out Black travel agents, Black hoteliers and Black-owned short-term rentals in addition to organizing in groups dedicated to Black travelers.In fact, according to the international survey of nearly 4,000 Black leisure travelers by MMGY Global, 54 percent of American respondents said they were more likely to visit a destination if they saw Black representation in travel advertising. In Britain and Ireland, 42 percent echoed that sentiment, and in Canada that number was 40 percent.“Another highly influential factor in the decision-making process is whether the destination is perceived as safe for Black travelers,” the survey noted. “Seventy-one percent of U.S. and Canadian respondents felt safety was extremely or very influential to their decision.”In Facebook groups, Clubhouse chat rooms and across other social media platforms, Black travelers regularly ask one another for recommendations about where to travel, particularly about where others have been where they felt safe and welcome. While these questions are often about foreign destinations, in a year when Americans could largely only travel within the United States, inquiries increasingly arose about where travelers felt safe within the country.“I was just curious on some good and safe locations for a first time solo traveler here in the States,” one woman posted in a group specifically for Black women travelers in June.“Where’s a good ‘safe’ place to travel in the States?” asked another woman who was planning a 35th birthday trip with her sister.This type of community gathering, though now online, isn’t new. For decades, African American travelers have looked to one another for guidance on where to travel. The most referenced form was Victor Hugo Green’s Green Book, a guide for Black travelers that was published annually from 1936 to 1966.Last summer, facing an onslaught of messaging from travel companies saying that they supported the Black Lives Matter movement and would be committing to diversifying their ranks and finding other ways to be more inclusive, Kristin Braswell, the owner of CrushGlobal, a company that works with locals around the world to plan trips, decided to make the inclusion of Black businesses central to her work.As a Black woman with a passion for travel, she started making travel guides that focused on supporting Black businesses. Each guide, whether it be to national parks, beach towns or wine country, provides information on businesses owned by Black people as well as guidance about diversity in the area and more.“These road trips and initiatives that speak to people of color in general are important because we’ve been left out of travel narratives,” Ms. Braswell said. “If you’re going to be creating experiences where people are going out into the world, all people should be included in those experiences.”Ms. Braswell added that the bulk of her business comes from Black travelers. These travelers, she said, are looking for Black travel advisers who have the knowledge of places where they are welcomed and can help them plan their trips. Over the past year travelers across racial backgrounds have been increasingly asking for tours and experiences that include Black-owned businesses, she said.Across the country, as people protested against police brutality, travelers demanded to see more travelers who looked like them in advertising; they spoke out against tourism boards that hadn’t been inclusive in the past and formed organizations like the Black Travel Alliance, calling for more Black travel influencers, writers and photographers to be employed.The Alliance and others have been pushing for more Black travelers to be visible and included in the industry and in spaces of leisure travel.Going beyond museumsAt the same time, tour providers like Free Egunfemi Bangura, the founder of Untold RVA, a Richmond-based organization, are offering tours that center on the contributions of Black people. In a city such as Richmond, which was once a capital of the Confederacy, she said that means seeing the value of working outside the established system of preservation societies and museums that are typically run by white leadership.To Ms. Bangura and other activists, artists and tour operators, museums and traditional preservation societies are part of the culture of exclusion that has historically left Black people out and continues to present versions of history that focus on white narratives. Ms. Bangura’s tours take place on the streets of the city as a better way to understand the local history.At a time when state legislatures are pushing for and passing laws that limit what and how much students learn about the contributions of Black and other marginalized people to the country, Ms. Bangura and others said, tours that show their contributions are even more important.“There is a way to take these experiences out of the hands of the traditional preservation community, so you don’t have to go into the walls of a museum,” Ms. Bangura said, adding that another reason institutions like museums aren’t optimal is because some people aren’t keen to visit them. “But think of how often it is that after you come outside of a Black-owned coffee shop, you’re actually able to hear about some of the Black people in that neighborhood or people that fought for Black freedom.”Kalela Williams, the founder of Black History Maven, leads a tour in Philadelphia’s Seventh Ward.Whitney IngramAdditionally, although the tourism industry took a hit last year, outdoor activities continued to draw visitors, making outdoor tours like Ms. Bangura’s and Ms. Fisher’s of Beyond the Bell popular. Ms. Bangura said the style of her offerings makes them accessible for all travelers, especially those without access to smartphones for scanning QR codes or those unable to take part in headphone-aided tours.Among the several kinds of tours and experiences Ms. Bangura has created is Black Monument Avenue, a three-block interactive experience in Richmond’s majority-Black Highland Park neighborhood. Visitors can drive through and call a designated phone line with unique access codes to hear songs, poems and messages about each installation. Every August, she runs Gabriel Week, honoring Gabriel Prosser, an enslaved man who led a rebellion in the Richmond area in 1800.“I call him brother General Gabriel,” Ms. Bangura said, adding that in her work, she encourages “people to decolonize their history by making sure that history is being told from the language of the oppressed, not the language of the oppressor.”Walking tours, for those who go on them, also provide a visceral sense of history that differs from the experience of a museum. Even as the National Museum of African American History and Culture has attracted record numbers of visitors to Washington, D.C., tours like Ms. Bangura’s can provide a more local perspective and show visitors exactly where something significant happened.“We can find community in walking together, we can find community in exploring a neighborhood together, and we can find a sense of where we are, we can find a sense of where folks have been and we can find common ground,” said Kalela Williams, the founder of Black History Maven, a Philadelphia company that primarily offers walking tours of the city that focus on Black history.“It’s important to see where things were, how things were working in relation to one another,” she said. “You can see the proximity of folks’ houses and schools and churches. You can imagine how folks would have walked around and navigated and visited each other in a way that you might not in a museum.”THE WORLD IS REOPENING. LET’S GO, SAFELY. Follow New York Times Travel on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. And sign up for our Travel Dispatch newsletter: Each week you’ll receive tips on traveling smarter, stories on hot destinations and access to photos from all over the world. More

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    Black Workers Stopped Making Progress on Pay. Is It Racism?

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    William Spriggs, a professor at Howard University, wrote an open letter last year to his fellow economists. Reacting to the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, he began the letter with a question: “Is now a teachable moment for economists?”Slamming what he saw as attempts to deny racial discrimination, Dr. Spriggs argued that economists should stop looking for a reason other than racism — some “omitted variable” — to account for why African Americans are falling further behind in the economy.“Hopefully, this moment will cause economists to reflect and rethink how we study racial disparities,” wrote Dr. Spriggs, who is Black. “Trapped in the dominant conversation, far too often African American economists find themselves having to prove that African Americans are equal.”After a year in which demands for racial justice acquired new resonance, Dr. Spriggs and others are pushing back against a strongly held tenet of economics: that differences in wages largely reflect differences in skill.While African Americans lag behind whites in educational attainment, that disparity has narrowed substantially over the last 40 years. Still, the wage gap hasn’t budged.In 2020, the typical full-time Black worker earned about 20 percent less than a typical full-time white worker. And Black men and women are far less likely than whites to have a job. So the median earnings for Black men in 2019 amounted to only 56 cents for every dollar earned by white men. The gap was wider than it was in 1970.Lost ProgressEarnings of Black men, as a percentage of the earnings of white men, are at the same place they were in the 1960s and 1970s. More

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    Biden’s Budget Has Racial Equity Efforts Baked In

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    The budget, which was released on Friday, includes tens of billions of dollars worth of programs intended to bolster the fortunes of people of color and other historically underserved groups.WASHINGTON — Six days after his inauguration, President Biden vowed that his administration would see everything through the lens of racial equality, making it “the business of the whole of government.”On Friday, his $6 trillion budget began to make good on that promise.Sprinkled throughout the president’s enormous spending plan are scores of programs amounting to tens of billions of dollars intended to specifically bolster the fortunes of Black people, Asian people, tribal communities and other historically underserved groups in the United States.Mr. Biden is not the first president to spend money on such programs. And civil rights advocates said the budget released on Friday fell short in some critical areas like student loans, where they say even more money is needed to rectify a longstanding lack of fairness and a lopsided burden being carried by minorities.“It’s going in the right direction, but it’s not a perfect document,” said Derrick Johnson, the president of the N.A.A.C.P., who said he was disappointed that the president’s budget did not call for canceling student loan debt, which falls disproportionately on Black Americans.But he added that his organization was pleased that the president was “continuing to make one of his priorities equity” via the budget.That idea — of focusing special attention on the distribution of taxpayer money across racial groups — has never been approached as methodically as it has this year by Mr. Biden, advocates say. Asked about the president’s equity agenda on Friday, Shalanda Young, the president’s acting budget director, said her department had “built that in” to the overall spending plan by giving “clear directions to our agencies that they are to use that lens as they implement these programs.”“This is not something we should have to call out,” she said. “This is something that should be pervasive in how the government does its business.”Much of the president’s vast budget directs spending that is not explicitly distributed based on race: health care, education, the military, transportation, agriculture, retirement programs and foreign policy, among other areas.But within all of those programs, Mr. Biden’s team has proposed increased spending with the goal of ensuring that people of color and others who are often left behind get a bigger share of the overall pie.Among the budget items, big and small, that are driven by equity:$3 billion to reduce maternal mortality and to end race-based disparities in maternal mortality.$15 billion for “Highways to Neighborhoods,” a program that would reconnect neighborhoods cut off by infrastructure projects developed decades ago.$900 million to fund Tribal efforts to expand affordable housing.$936 million for an Accelerating Environmental and Economic Justice initiative at the Environmental Protection Agency.$110 million for a Thriving Communities initiative, to foster transportation equity through grants to underserved communities.$39 billion for tuition subsidies to low- and middle-income students attending historically Black colleges and universities and those serving other minority groups.Mr. Biden foreshadowed that kind of budgetary decision-making in his first days in office. In a speech announcing his “equity agenda,” the president said he was committed to going further than his predecessors when it came to considering groups that had, in his words, been too often left behind.“We need to open the promise of America to every American,” he said during the speech on Jan. 26. “And that means we need to make the issue of racial equity not just an issue for any one department of government.”That approach has incited anger from conservatives, who accuse the president and his advisers of pursuing a racist agenda against white Americans. Fox News ran a headline accusing Mr. Biden of trying to “Stoke Nationwide Division With ‘Racial Equity’ Push.” And The New York Post published an editorial, titled “In Push for Woke ‘Equity,’ Biden Abandons Equality,” that accused the president of being “un-American.”The budget contains “Highways to Neighborhoods,” which reconnects neighborhoods cut off by historic infrastructure projects, such as Claiborne Avenue in New Orleans.Abdul Aziz for The New York TimesA group called America First Legal, which is run by Stephen Miller and Mark Meadows, two top aides to former President Donald J. Trump, won a preliminary injunction this week from a Texas judge against an effort by Mr. Biden’s Small Business Administration to prioritize grants from its $28.6 billion Restaurant Revitalization Fund to businesses owned by minorities or underserved groups.“This order is another powerful strike against the Biden administration’s unconstitutional decision to pick winners and losers based on the color of their skin,” the group said in a statement.The president appears unlikely to back down. In a speech days after his inauguration, he vowed that “every White House component, and every agency will be involved in this work because advancing equity has to be everyone’s job.”Still, for all of Mr. Biden’s forceful rhetoric — he once pledged to no longer allow “a narrow, cramped view of the promise of this nation to fester” — his administration made little effort on Friday to focus attention on that principle or to highlight details about how an equity-driven approach would change the way the government spends its money..css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-w739ur{margin:0 auto 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(min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-1rh1sk1{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-1rh1sk1 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-1rh1sk1 em{font-style:italic;}.css-1rh1sk1 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#ccd9e3;text-decoration-color:#ccd9e3;}.css-1rh1sk1 a:visited{color:#333;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#ccc;text-decoration-color:#ccc;}.css-1rh1sk1 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}During a news conference to introduce the budget on Friday, Ms. Young and Cecilia Rouse, the chairwoman of the White House’s National Economic Council — both of whom are Black women — did not mention the president’s equity agenda until a reporter asked about it toward the end.And the budget itself does not try to quantify the effect of following the president’s guidance to make decisions based on a sense of racial equity. There is no “equity” section of the budget. Aides did not send out fact sheets to reporters on Friday promoting the “equity spending” in the president’s inaugural budget.That left some of the public relations work to civil rights groups and other advocates, who quickly pointed to examples of spending that would benefit communities who had traditionally been left behind by previous presidents.Sara Chieffo, the chief lobbyist for the League of Conservation Voters, an pro-environment group, pointed to the $936 million Accelerating Environmental and Economic Justice initiative at the Environmental Protection Agency, which is aimed at cleaning up the environment in underserved communities.“The importance of this administration’s proposal to make the largest-ever investment in communities of color and low-income communities who have been subjected to environmental racism for decades cannot be overstated,” Ms. Chieffo said.Marcela Howell, the president of In Our Own Voice: National Black Women’s Reproductive Justice Agenda, praised the president for investing in programs that specifically benefit Black women.“Kudos also go to President Biden for funding important programs to address racial equity and economic security,” she said in a statement, adding that “we applaud the proposed investments in infrastructure and job creation, affordable child care and work force training, education” and more.The Planned Parenthood Federation of America issued a statement thanking Mr. Biden for what the group called “important investments” that it said would help to “address the maternal mortality crisis and its devastating impact in communities of color.” More

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    Banks Fight $4 Billion Debt Relief Plan for Black Farmers

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    Lenders are pressuring the Agriculture Department to give them more money, saying quick repayments will cut into profits.WASHINGTON — The Biden administration’s efforts to provide $4 billion in debt relief to minority farmers is encountering stiff resistance from banks, which are complaining that the government initiative to pay off the loans of borrowers who have faced decades of financial discrimination will cut into their profits and hurt investors. More

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    Jerome Powell strikes a hopeful tone but emphasizes the pandemic’s uneven costs.

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    Jerome H. Powell, the Federal Reserve chair, struck a hopeful tone about the United States economy in a speech on Monday — but he emphasized that the economic fallout from the coronavirus pandemic has disproportionately harmed vulnerable communities.“While some countries are still suffering terribly in the grip of Covid-19, the economic outlook here in the United States has clearly brightened,” Mr. Powell said. And in the United States, “lives and livelihoods have been affected in ways that vary from person to person, family to family, and community to community.”Mr. Powell used the remarks to preview an upcoming Fed report that will show how Black and Hispanic workers lost jobs at a greater rate in pandemic lockdowns and how the pandemic pushed mothers out of the labor force and made it harder for people without college degrees to hang onto work.Among the statistics he highlighted from the Survey of Household Economics and Decisionmaking, which he said will be released later this month:About 20 percent of adults in their prime working years without a bachelor’s degree were laid off last year, compared to 12 percent of college-educated workers.More than 20 percent of Black and Hispanic prime-age workers were laid off in 2020, versus 14 percent of white workers.Roughly 22 percent of parents were not working or were working less thanks to child-care and school disruptions.About 36 percent of Black mothers, and 30 percent of and Hispanic mothers, were not working or were working less.“The Fed is focused on these longstanding disparities because they weigh on the productive capacity of our economy,” Mr. Powell said. “We will only reach our full potential when everyone can contribute to, and share in, the benefits of prosperity.”Mr. Powell said that while achieving an equitable economy is the job of many parts of government, the Fed has a role to play with both its economic tools and in its bank supervision and community development work.“Those who have historically been left behind stand the best chance of prospering in a strong economy with plentiful job opportunities,” Mr. Powell said. “We see our robust supervisory approach as critical to addressing racial discrimination, which can limit consumers’ ability to improve their economic circumstances.” More