Atlanta built a mecca for Black businesses, but inequality persists

Haz Musa is a quintessential Atlanta entrepreneur. Musa, born and raised here, was only 14 when he started working alongside his aunt making grills at her jewelry shop, Lucky’s Gold, in the flea market on Metropolitan Parkway.

“I was doing 20 to 50 same-day grills, just me and my aunt,” said Musa, 30. “She would do the waxing, I would do the polishing.”

Eventually the shop moved to the Greenbriar flea market. When he was 18, he started taking dental technology classes at Atlanta Technical College, and by the time he was about 20, he took over when his aunt wanted to retire.

He renamed the business Royal Teeth Lab, growing it beyond the bounds of the flea market, adding two other locations, one off the Beltline and the other inside Ndstry ATL, his cousin’s creative studio.

Celebs like Erykah Badu are clients. Musa made her a set of grills she showcased on the red carpet of the Met Gala in 2023, a unique mix of ebony and ivory cameos on her top row of teeth and freshwater pearls on the bottom.

“As far as the culture, the commerce, the power, you know, of us feeding each other,” he said, “it’s No. 1 for entrepreneurship to me.”

Atlanta’s reputation goes back more than 100 years, starting with Alonzo Herndon, Atlanta’s first Black millionaire.

Herndon was born into slavery about 45 miles east of Atlanta. After emancipation, he eventually made his way to the city, where he built a fortune through barbershops and the Atlanta Life Insurance Co., which sat proudly on Auburn Avenue for decades.

But Herndon wasn’t alone. Auburn Avenue was a bustling Black business corridor, Atlanta’s own “Black Wall Street.”

Then came Herman J. Russell.

A lifelong Atlantan, Russell built a small plastering firm into one of the most successful Black-owned real estate development and construction businesses of the 20th century. Many Russell proteges created their own successful companies, like Egbert Perry, founder and chairman of the Integral Group, and T. Dallas Smith, founder of his own eponymous commercial real estate firm.

Business is one side of the coin. The other came in politics and the rise of Maynard Jackson.

As first Black mayor of Atlanta, Jackson mandated minimum percentages of city and airport contracts that had to go to minority firms, which inspired other cities and even the federal government to create similar programs. He also advocated for the hiring and promotion of Black people in private companies.

The mandates he put in place set a foundation for minority businesses that lingers to this day.

The city’s reputation helped convince Lamar Tyler and his wife, Ronnie, to move their family and business to metro Atlanta in 2010 from the Washington, D.C., area. They had started a blog a few years prior that began taking off, and the Tylers were at a crossroads.

“I either had to stay at my job or go full-fledged into the business,” Lamar Tyler said. Atlanta is a hub for digital media, so they moved.

As the Tylers’ blog continued to grow, so did their stature. In 2015 they started a company, Traffic Sales and Profit, focused on using what they’d learned to help other entrepreneurs. Tyler said TSP wouldn’t have had the same success if he had launched it in another city.

The marquee TSP event is its annual Atlanta conference.

“I think when people come in, they see hope, and they say, ‘Hey, you know what? I see a community here. I see a lot of African American people in the city that make a lot of money. … I see success,’” he said.

There’s no exact figure of how many total Black-owned businesses there are in Atlanta, because data is collected differently for the two types of businesses: sole proprietorships, or businesses with no employees, and employer firms, which have employees. About 97% of Black businesses in the region are sole proprietorships, according to Kindred Futures, but there is no firm number on those businesses.

But census data can pinpoint how many Black-owned employer firms there are in metro Atlanta: 13,766. The region has the top rate of Black-owned employer firms of any U.S. metro, according to data firm LendingTree.

Despite that ranking, metro Atlanta still falls short of parity. About 37% of metro Atlanta is Black, but only 11% of employer firms are Black-owned, a recent study from the Brookings Institution found. If the number of Black businesses grew to match its share of the population, Brookings found there would be nearly 50,000 more Black-owned employer firms, and create more than 326,000 new jobs.

Scaling Black-owned companies is Jay Bailey’s life’s work. Bailey is president and CEO of the H.J. Russell Innovation Center for Entrepreneurs nonprofit, and an entrepreneur himself.

Growing up in Decatur, Bailey was surrounded by business owners who inspired him to start making money for himself. At 12, he started installing car stereo equipment and went on to launch a string of businesses. Now at the innovation center, he helps fill a gap for Black entrepreneurs to grow their businesses.

He said the Atlanta community could be doing better at funding and investing in its own businesses, pointing out that the city’s reputation of having a hustle culture “comes out of, oftentimes, lack of resource or a scarcity of resource.”

“How do we start to weaponize and galvanize all the economic strength that we have in the city to promote innovation, to promote forward movement, and taking that one business of two employees and making it five?” Bailey said.

In fact, the city is one of the most represented cities on ForbesBLK’s list of the 50 most impactful, powerful and wealthiest Black Americans. The rankings included Atlanta entertainment powerhouses like Tyler Perry, as well as business owners like Tope Awotona, the founder of scheduling software Calendly. Awotona is worth an estimated $1.4 billion, according to Forbes.

But researchers say those individual successes can’t on their own overcome centuries of systematic economic subjugation and exclusion of Black Americans, particularly in the South, according to a recent report by Kindred Futures.

For children who grow up in Atlanta’s English Avenue neighborhood, just 3 miles southwest of Calendly’s Midtown headquarters, their average household income by the time they reach 35 years old is about $15,000, according to the Opportunity Atlas, a census dataset.

For Alex Camardelle, the group’s vice president of policy and research, Atlanta can be considered a Black business mecca only if its definition is “about attracting potential business owners or founders.”

“But I think we conflate being a Black mecca with being a thriving Black business ecosystem. And that, I can say for a fact, we don’t have,” Camardelle said. He points to disparities in revenue, the Black population in the city declining and issues with commercial affordability.

But where politicians might be faltering, there is a constellation of institutions that provide resources for minority entrepreneurs.

There are the university centers, like the Center for Black Entrepreneurship at Spelman College and Morehouse College; the Morehouse Innovation and Entrepreneurship Center; Clark Atlanta University’s Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurial Development; and the University of Georgia’s Small Business Development Center at Georgia State University.

Then there’s the city-run Women’s Entrepreneurship Initiative, as well as private efforts like the Village Marketplace, and nonprofits like the Urban League of Greater Atlanta and the Russell Innovation Center for Entrepreneurs.

But entrepreneurs pointed to a lack of access to capital as a lingering obstacle.

“You would think that in this mecca of Black businesses, there would also be a mecca of Black financial resources … and it’s just not there,” said Dana Roberts, co-founder of tween period care company Scarlet by RedDrop.

Last year, Roberts and co-founder Monica Williams applied to every pitch competition they came across because they had not been able to raise money from traditional investors despite having sold $7 million worth of products.

Their application spree paid off. RedDrop won $1 million late last year in the Pharrell Williams-backed Black Ambition competition in New York. Their products are now in more than 350 Ulta stores.

Though Atlanta has provided community and support from other entrepreneurs, it hasn’t provided funding.

“It would be really, really great if, on top of the comradery, on top of the networking effect that happens,” Williams said, “there were also … some tools that took you from where we were and showed you exactly how to get incremental funding. And then, ‘How do you take that funding and really level up your business?’”

“Atlanta: America’s Black Mecca?” is an original content series from UATL that explores that question with data-driven, thoughtful reporting that prioritizes the voices of locals and transplants who call this city home. These stories will appear in the paper, UATL.com and AJC.com each month through January. Got a Black mecca story to tell? We want to hear about your experiences. Hit us up at uatl@ajc.com.