“In order for Black people and Black entrepreneurs to be successful, they had to be outliers,” says Don Peebles, CEO of The Peebles Corporation, which manages some $8 billion-worth of properties in New York and six other cities across the U.S. Even today, only about 2% of real estate firms in the U.S. are minority-owned, according to a study by Bella Research Group and the Knight Foundation.
A.H. Brown stands with a group that includes Martin Luther King, Sr. at Charleston, West Virginia’s First Baptist Church in 1971.Due to segregation, Brown saw a need to create the infrastructure the Black community needed to survive, Taylor says. In the early 1920s, Brown built and rented offices to local entrepreneurs, including a restaurant, a hot dog stand, a drug store, a barbershop, laundry rooms and a pool room.
In addition to his commercial properties, Brown bought land around Charleston to build houses, which he rented affordably to Black community members who may have had trouble securing housing from the mostly all-white realtors at the time. When Brown’s children, Willard and Della, attended Boston University for their graduate degrees, Brown bought three properties in Cambridge, Mass. .
And while Black real estate entrepreneurs like Brown could capitalize on the niche market of selling to their own communities, they faced challenges like a lack of access to bank loans, says Beryl Satter, a history professor at Rutgers University-Newark.