Companies can build diverse and inclusive business ecosystems using a cooperative advantage approach.
Last year marked a century since the Tulsa Race Massacre, when, on May 31, 1921, the area known as Black Wall Street in the Greenwood district of the Oklahoma city was burned to the ground and approximately 300 of its residents were killed by an angry White mob.
During that same time period, a thousand miles away, the neighborhood known as Hayti in Durham, North Carolina— arguably the area’s own Black Wall Street — was thriving. In fact, by the end of 1921, the North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company (NC Mutual), which had been founded in 1898, moved its headquarters from Hayti to a luxurious, modern building in Durham’s largely White downtown. The new six-story building became a symbol for Durham as the “capital of the Black middle class,” as sociologist E. Franklin Frazier would later put it.
Why were the experiences of these two Black business communities so different, and what can they teach us about how to encourage Black entrepreneurship and business today?