Collaborative Seattle List of Black Owned Businesses
Earlier today a close friend of mind sent me a link. He’s in Detroit, while I’m in Seattle. The link was to a google sheet that had 17 people currently working to fill in the blanks of data for a list of black owned businesses in Detroit. The sheet was initiated by Lesley Hairston and is still currently in development by several anonymous collaborators.
Detroit is a true Chocolate City (as Parliament would describe), filled with black art, restaurants, boutiques, and many other black owned services, but Seattle is different. Although Seattle is an urban center, Blacks are not the majority and therefore there are not as many black business owners. Regardless, every city should have a black business directory so that blacks can make conscious decisions about what community we’re putting our money in to. There is a reason why black business are closing all over the nation and our communities are deteriorating as a result. 
We must be revolutionary with our spending.
September 20th, after I learned about the nationwide prison strikes I decided to go out into the streets and publicly display my outrage against corporations that profit from prison labor. September 30th, after hearing about District 11 Court of Appeal’s court ruling I decided to style my hair into locs as a form of protest. I have been determined to make my body a walking form of protest. It has been a struggle for me, however, to revolutionize my spending. Not because I don’t want to, but because there is no centralized database for black owned businesses. There are a few websites with VERY limited information and I know of a few establishments but not enough to completely rule out not buying black. I’m forced to purchase goods and services outside of my community simply due to the lack of knowledge of black owned alternatives. Today is the day that we bridge that gap, research alternatives, compile the information and put our money back into our community.
We are at a pivotal point in the movement. The realization of a systematic problem must be combatted with a series of solutions that include: protesting, petitioning, boycotting, etc. However, in our Capitalist Democracy, the most influential strategy would be economic. We need to be conscious of where we spend our money, not only consciously not supporting those who are against us, but also making the decision to support ourselves by switching from Wal-Mart to Black owned businesses.
Following the lead of Detroit I compiled a similar sheet by looking through several sites. I put a series of information within a spreadsheet including: store name, owner name, website, address, description. The table is nowhere near complete, and I never expect it to be because as our consciousness changes I expect our black business community to grow. I will continue to add more information, but now I invite my black brothers and sisters to contribute, this is a collaborative database. We’ve learned from the past that we can never expect one person to come save us, we must collaborate in order to move forward. Black Seattle, lets come together and shine a light over our entrepreneurs.
Sadly, as I was verifying the data there were many businesses that were permanently closed, many non- existent websites, many broken urls and other obstacles. It breaks my heart to see but resiliency is in our blood and we are rising. Contact me using the form below if for some reason you cannot access the directory and would like to add to it or make any changes. I’d also like to extend an invitation to any black owned business struggling with their online presence web development, use the contact form below as well.
As a business owner myself I’m asked on a daily basis about other black owned businesses in my area, so I’ve been longing to create a database to direct people to and now it’s here. Please add to the List of Seattle Black Owned Businesses. Add as much information as you can find and fill in missing blanks for others so that we can all have a well rounded table of data. Google Docs saves all previous edits, therefore if any information is accidentally deleted it can easily be restored. As information is verified and confirmed a new tab will be added to sawarimi.org catered to searching through these listings.
You can find the Detroit List, initiated by Lesley Hairston here.
