Graves, Earl Gilbert Sr.

Impact on the world

After serving as an administrative assistant to Senator Robert F. Kennedy until Kennedy's 1968 assassination, Graves used a $250,000 loan from Chase Manhattan Bank to launch Black Enterprise in August 1970 — a magazine that became profitable within ten issues and grew into a diversified multimedia company reaching more than 6 million African Americans through print, digital, broadcast, and live events; its annual “BE 100s” ranking of the largest Black-owned businesses became the industry's benchmark measure of Black economic progress. The magazine introduced the wider public to figures including Oprah Winfrey, Kenneth Chenault, Robert L. Johnson, and Reginald F. Lewis, and Robert F. Smith, already profiled in this collection, has credited reading Black Enterprise with steering him toward a career in finance. Graves also built his own business empire outside publishing, at one point owning one of the nation's largest Black-owned Pepsi-Cola distributorships, and received the NAACP's Spingarn Medal in 1999; his bestselling book, How to Succeed in Business Without Being White (1997), made both the Wall Street Journal and New York Times bestseller lists.

Life & background

Born January 9, 1935, in Brooklyn, New York, to Barbadian immigrant Earl Godwin Graves and Trinidadian immigrant Winifred Sealy Graves, he was raised in Bedford-Stuyvesant and earned a BA in economics from Morgan State University in 1958, where he joined Omega Psi Phi fraternity and completed Army ROTC, Airborne, and Ranger training. He served two years as an Army officer before working in law enforcement and real estate, then joined Senator Kennedy's staff in 1965. He married Barbara Kydd in 1960; the couple had three sons, all of whom worked in the family business, including Earl “Butch” Graves Jr., who succeeded him as CEO. Morgan State renamed its business school the Earl G. Graves School of Business and Management in 2015, and he died April 6, 2020, in New York after a long battle with Alzheimer's disease.

Sources

1. BlackPast.org; Black Enterprise; ABC News