Earl Graves Sr.

Earl Gilbert Graves Sr. was born on the ninth of January 1935 in Brooklyn, New York, the son of Earl Godwin Graves, a Barbadian immigrant, and Winifred (Sealy) Graves, who came from Trinidad. His father worked as assistant manager of the Overland Garment Company, an apparel firm in New York City, and the family made its home in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood, where young Earl grew up among the West Indian community and showed an enterprising spirit from boyhood.

Graves earned a bachelor's degree in economics from Morgan State University in 1958. A member of Omega Psi Phi, he completed Army ROTC and served as a paratrooper, graduating from Airborne and Ranger schools. After the military he worked in real estate and then joined the staff of Senator Robert F. Kennedy as an administrative assistant, a formative post that ended with Kennedy's assassination in 1968.

Turning that loss into purpose, Graves founded a consulting firm advising corporations on urban affairs, then launched a newsletter that grew into a full magazine. The first issue of Black Enterprise reached newsstands in August 1970. Under his leadership it became the definitive chronicle of African American business, and its annual Black Enterprise 100 listing of the largest Black-owned companies made visible an economy long overlooked.

Honored with the NAACP Spingarn Medal and more than four dozen other awards, Graves saw Morgan State name its business school for him in 2015. He died on the sixth of April 2020, at the age of eighty-five. He is remembered as a builder who taught a people to see, and to claim, their own enterprise.