Black Businessmen in County Chart Gains Despite Uphill Battle

They are Orange County’s smallest minority, a few thousand at most.

But black business people nonetheless are slowly emerging as an economic force of their own, propelled by the 3-year-old Black Business Alliance of Orange County.

The 50-member organization “is for doers and dreamers,” says Josh White, chairman of the group.

Once a month, the doers and dreamers gather in a small room at the Mercury Savings & Loan office in Anaheim Hills to chronicle their progress, share their successes and failures and chart their economic futures.

These days, some of the doers seem to be doing all right.

- Harold Estes is a computer engineer with Digital Equipment Corp. and is training for a management post. In addition, Estes operates a business from an office in his Garden Grove house--he teaches others how to run their own business.

“Opportunities for black businesses in Orange County are unlimited,” Estes says.

- E. Andre Douglas of Costa Mesa had little capital but high hopes when he started a travel brokerage and marketing company in Orange. At first, Douglas advertised his company in small shoppers and wore out the soles of his shoes promoting his company. On Friday , barely a year after opening its doors, his company will launch a national advertising campaign. Douglas says business is “excellent.”

- Clarence Scott of La Palma founded Brandon Supply Inc., a distributor of pipes and valves, six years ago. The company now has operations in Buena Park and Santa Fe Springs, grossed $1.5 million in 1985 and, Scott says, “is looking to improve on that this year.”

As Scott see it, color makes little difference when doing business in Orange County. “If you can deliver, they will do business with you,” he said of the area’s business community.

Some say that it is frustrating for Orange County blacks to see the growing economic prowess of newly arrived Asian immigrants--an ethnic group that is considerably larger, wealthier and seemingly more organized than the county’s black population.

Fiscal Foundation

Koreans, for example, have formed their own banks, which give them a fiscal foundation to support other businesses.

“We have to develop that,” said Joe Haywood, an insurance broker with the Tax & Financial Group in Irvine. “It (the lack of black-owned banks) is killing us. We’ve never developed an economic base.”

Because their origins are scattered across Africa and the Caribbean, several BBA members said, blacks lack the cultural solidarity that Asian and Latino immigrant groups possess, a unity that translates into community support for their business ventures.

“Blacks as a whole face a real identity crisis,” said Haywood, founder and president of the Los Angeles-based Black Business Network.

Beside their relatively small numbers, blacks in Orange County face some unusual circumstances in trying to establish business networks.

Unlike almost every other major metropolitan area of the nation, Orange County lacks a black neighborhood that could become a base for service businesses catering to blacks--a focus area like the Vietnamese community in Westminster and Garden Grove that has generated a potent economic network of Vietnamese businesses that serve each other.

Lacking such connections, black business people in Orange County do most of their business with Asians, Latinos and whites.

“I’ve never done a deal with a black, ever,” said Wayne Williamson, a BBA member and chief executive and owner of First American Business Properties Inc., a Newport Beach-based commercial and industrial real estate concern.

His story is not unusual. Until the BBA was formed, Orange County blacks lacked any unifying economic force.

“We’re really the first generation,” Haywood said. “We only got our rights in the ‘60s.”

At first, Haywood said, it was the church that was the unifying force for blacks. But in the 1980s “and from here on out, we’ve got to depend on black business.”

And so blacks in business in the county look with great hope to events like the BBA’s second annual economic development conference, scheduled Feb. 18-19 at the Anaheim Sheraton. Like the first conference, it aims “to make minority businesses aware of what organizations are available to help them,” said Douglas, co-chairman of the event along with Fran Marabou Williams, a Santa Ana-based educational consultant.

“Our purpose is to promote and expand (black) business in Orange County,” said Jim McClellan, president of the BBAOC and a senior sales representative with Digital Equipment Corp. in Costa Mesa. “Our children will be the real benefactors.”

And to help make that long-term difference, the BBA is organizing a program to teach high school students how to operate a business.

Most BBA members seem to think that the hurdles ahead are economic--that the racial hurdles are largely behind them.

With Latinos, Asians and Caucasians continuing to lead Orange County’s population surge, blacks probably will not increase their proportion in Orange County for generations.

But members of the alliance don’t seem daunted by their lack of presence.

“It’s not lonely but challenging,” said Gwen McClellan, the group’s secretary.

“People feel if you are in Orange County you have something going for you, regardless of color,” said Haywood.