Earl Graves Sr.

Earl Gilbert Graves Sr. was born on the ninth of January 1935 at Brooklyn, New York, the son of Earl Godwin Graves — a Barbadian immigrant who had arrived at New York in 1925 and worked as a garment-district presser — and Winifred Sealy Graves, a Barbadian-born domestic worker. He was raised in the West Indian Black-Brooklyn district of Bedford-Stuyvesant of the inter-war period.

He was placed at six at the Brooklyn Public School 93 and at the Brooklyn Erasmus Hall High School at the secondary level. He took the bachelor’s in economics at the Morgan State University at Baltimore in 1958 — among the first generation of post-war Morgan State business graduates — and served the United States Army Reserve from 1959 to 1968 as a paratrooper of the 19th Special Forces Group, retiring as a captain.

He took employment from 1958 to 1960 at the Manhattan branch of the Lederle Laboratories of the American Cyanamid Corporation — selling pharmaceuticals to the Black-physician community of the New York metropolitan area — and at the Manhattan real-estate firm of Carmoor Real Estate Company from 1960 to 1965.

He was hired by Robert F. Kennedy in October 1965 as the senator’s administrative assistant for the Brownsville and Bedford-Stuyvesant offices, and served Kennedy in the same capacity through the senator’s assassination of the sixth of June 1968.

He took the small severance from the Kennedy senatorial office at the close of June 1968 and a one-year Coro Foundation Fellowship in public affairs — the principal post-graduate Black urban-affairs fellowship of the period — and used the combined funds across the closing months of 1969 and the opening months of 1970 to plan a monthly business magazine for the Black professional and entrepreneurial class.

He published on the first of August 1970 the first issue of Black Enterprise — a glossy monthly business magazine modelled on the Henry Luce Time and the Henry Luce Fortune — at an opening print run of one hundred thousand. The magazine surpassed by 1976 a paid circulation of two hundred and fifty thousand and by 1986 a paid circulation of three hundred and fifty thousand.

He published in the first issue of Black Enterprise of the first of June 1973 the inaugural Black Enterprise 100 list — the first systematic list of the hundred largest Black-owned American companies by gross revenue — which became from the period the principal annual ranking of Black-owned American business. The first list was led by the Motown Record Corporation of Berry Gordy at gross revenues of forty-five million dollars.

He co-founded in 1990 with Earvin ‘Magic’ Johnson the Pepsi-Cola of Washington, D.C. bottling franchise — at the time the largest Black-owned bottling franchise of the Pepsi-Cola system in the United States.

He died at White Plains, New York on the sixth of April 2020 of complications of Alzheimer’s disease, at eighty-five.

He is honored here as the publisher of Black Enterprise.