We have no definite figures of the exact amount invested in our business ventures. Though it is small when compared with the vast amounts invested by others, yet it is enormous when compared with our actual resources. The Negro merchant and professional man, have ceased to be novelties, and in many sections are making serious impressions on the business of both city and country.
We may still regard our enterprises as pioneer. We can even see the visible signs of our endeavors to learn a business while conducting it. Yet it is quite gratifying to notice an improvement. Our ventures are taking on more and more the general character of business, and losing the less desirable ones of race peculiarities.
What are the causes of so many failures among our enterprises, especially those that gave promise of great success? This question like the historic ghost will not down, but walks at unseemly hours, both by day and by night, calling for an adjustment of our commercial and economic sins, that it may go to its rest.
Our men do not have that thorough grasp of business principles, that comes with years of experience. One cause for our mistakes is that we do not have the opportunity of apprenticeship. The white youth enters an establishment, and step by step learns a business before he starts in it for himself. He thereby places a large factor of success to his credit.
The Negro goes into business without that intimate knowledge that is so essential, and stumbles into success or into failure. But this condition is gradually changing. We have been in active life long enough to have somewhat of an apprentice class of our own. Here and there we find men, who have, through this system gained a knowledge that gives them a decided advantage. It is through these means that we hope to improve the personnel of our merchant class, the character of our enterprises, and increase our patronage because of the excellency of the service.
One great need of our enterprises is the freedom of location. Experience and capital are both seriously hampered by want of proper place to house business. I have seen a prosperous merchant move across a street and fail. I have seen a splendid business carried around a corner and utterly destroyed.
If this is so with those who have choice of places, how much more must it be so with us who must take what we can get, and what wonder is it that we utterly fail, or that we imbibe the squalor and shiftlessness of the miserable places we must occupy. All life is subject to the same general physiological influences. Man and plant alike flourish in the sunshine, and fade and weaken in the damp and dark. Our business languishes as much from environment as from any other cause. Trade is a sensitive thing and increases or decreases according to fixed laws, and there must be more than goods to attract active patronage. Grant us this freedom of location and our road to success through business ventures would be much shortened.
I do not lay our failures to external causes alone. There are other and as grave ones within. Certain economic exactions must be complied with before success is ever assured. Some do not choose the pursuits for which they are best fitted, but strike out boldly and confidently, forgetful that adaptability is always an essential factor in success. Some are unable to carry out their plans from lack of capital. This has also kept many from getting the business training that is so necessary, and we therefore have less merchants and more storekeepers. We must know that business is progressive and demands an ideal. The whole system of Southern commercial life has been revolutionized, but the revolution is the product of a great evolution.
Under these conditions, have our business and professional men done their best to attract and hold the patronage of our people, or have they been content to drift along and catch whatever may come their way? Have they realized that they have obligations as well as those to whom they would sell? They have not done all of their duty, nor have they been as progressive as they might have been. Yet when we think of the severe handicaps they have had, we feel that they have done remarkably well. Life is a continual comparison, to-day with yesterday, this year with last. In the comparison we see better merchants, better stores, and higher business ideals among us. These appeal to us very sensibly, and we give more and more liberally of our patronage.
We are apt to forget the terrible handicaps that faced us as a people not so long ago, and the commercial ones that face our business men of to-day. We grow impatient with their mistakes and twit them because they are unable to display as large and as valuable a stock as some one else, or because of their shabby establishments. We are too exacting. We are not as generously inclined towards our enterprises as we should be, and it is only when we put ourselves in places that require patronage, that we can understand why so many fail. The power to discriminate between the useful and useless is born of experience and is of slow growth. The struggle between the right and wrong, the necessary and unnecessary is the heritage that came to us with our sudden birth of racehood. All fields of endeavor are new to us, and even when there are no restrictions, our adjustment must be slow.