Entrepreneurial Initiative
Courtesy of State Archives of Florida, Florida Memory
Booker T. Washington believed in the power of the entrepreneurial initiative as a path to economic freedom, and he said so as often as possible. At a 1912 he said to an audience of farmers, “the farmer who grows vegetables, take some butter, some fowls, some eggs or fruit berries into town on Saturday, is the farmer who has some cash coming in every day in the year instead of having cash only once a year.” The following year in an 1913 address to the annual meeting of the National Negro Business League, he stated that during his travels throughout the South he observed room “for at least 900,000 independent self-supporting Negro farmers. . . 4000 more grocery stores. . . [and] 1000 more good restaurants and hotels.”
