More Black and Hispanic Entrepreneurs Are Open for Business

Stephon Sanders is a soft-spoken 16-year-old Black student in Tampa, Florida who loves playing basketball and video games like Fortnite and Apex Legends and can often be found wearing an athletic jacket and basketball shorts.

He’s also the founder and chief executive officer of a mobile entertainment business, Street Gamez, that can amp up any party with a 32-foot, $55,000 trailer full of video game consoles for up to 28 players. He plans to add a $45,000 mobile gaming bus, staffed by a second crew, and move beyond the Tampa area to serve North and South Carolina.

Sanders’ single mother, Tiffany-Autumn Bell, 35, cashed out much of her savings and gave up nearly all of her already scarce free time to support her then-13-year-old son’s dream of launching a mobile entertainment video business.

To Bell, an Army veteran who served in Afghanistan and has her own full-time job as an IT project manager, helping Sanders become an entrepreneur was about making sure his life and career options were not limited by his race.

“I don’t want my son going into the world thinking he can’t do things,” said Bell, who is Street Gamez’s chief operating officer and handles booking and billing.

To help her son, Bell took an eight-week certificate program in entrepreneurship and innovation at Tampa-based Hillsborough Community College and enrolled in the school’s associate degree in business program, from which she will graduate next year.

Increasing numbers of Black and Hispanic Americans are starting their own businesses to serve their communities and avoid working for someone else.

“When we ask random students on campus what their career ambitions are, I would say 70 to 80 percent of them are telling us it is to be entrepreneurs,” said Thaddeus McEwen, a professor of entrepreneurship at historically Black North Carolina Agricultural & Technical State University.

Entrepreneurship in general is up since the start of the pandemic. Nationally, in 2020 an average of 380 out of every 100,000 adults started new businesses in a given month, according to the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation. That’s up from 310 per 100,000 in 2019 and is by far the highest level of new entrepreneurship in the 25 years the foundation has tracked this data.

The rate was highest among Hispanic Americans—520 per 100,000. But the rate of entrepreneurship rose most sharply among Black Americans last year to match the overall national rate of 380 per 100,000, nearly double the rate of 1996, the first year the Kauffman Foundation tracked ethnicity data. Immigrants start businesses at higher rates than nonimmigrants, contributing to the higher figure for Hispanic Americans.

Many are entrepreneurs out of necessity, the foundation says, forced to start their own businesses because they were laid off or due to other reasons beyond their control. Black and Hispanic Americans make up a disproportionate share of workers in many of the sectors most affected by the pandemic, such as the retail, restaurant, construction, and service industries.

For many, Covid-19 has also been a wake-up call that life is fleeting and inherently risky, which has encouraged them to launch businesses aligned with their passions.

Just as more people are starting businesses, more are also enrolling in entrepreneurship courses, particularly Black and Hispanic Americans. While the number of white graduates of entrepreneurship and small business programs grew 16 percent from 2018 to 2020, the number who are Black increased nearly 72 percent and the number who are Hispanic rose 40 percent, according to data from the US Department of Education.