North Carolina's recipe for growth: regional profile

Black Enterprise, June, 1996 by Bridgette A. Lacy, Majorie Whigham-Desir

RTP was the collective brainchild of a former governor working with a small group of influential local businesspeople and academics. Its success has spurred the local economy into becoming one of the hottest nationally, if not internationally. A significant number of the state's international and ethnically diverse community of scholars and corporate execs can also be found here.

AstroTurf was developed and AZT Formulated at RTP. It is also at RTP that IBM, North Carolina's fifth largest employer, has located its offices. The greatest number of well-paying jobs in the Triangle, Triad and Charlotte regions are in the biotechnology, telemarketing, real estate and finance industries.

During his 22-year tenure as a county commissioner, Bill Bell saw Durham transform itself from a land of textiles and tobacco to pharmaceutical and hightech companies. That transformation has given Durham the tax base it needed to build new schools and improve its infrastructure. The Triangle has also become an intellectual capital with one of the highest per capita concentration of Ph.D.s in the country. Surprisingly to outsiders, there are more endowed professorships held by African Americans in the University of North Carolina system than at any other college or university. And, to address the growing need for technically trained employees, many of North Carolina's community colleges now offer technical degrees. These degrees, in turn, can quickly prove useful in landing a job in the state's growing medical and scientific research community.

But many of the 20,000 African Americans who have moved to the state find that one job is not enough, personally or financially. "We have a lot of underemployment," admits Howard Lee, the first African American to be elected mayor of a predominantly white North Carolina town in 1969. "People are often holding positions beneath their skill levels. So, to make ends meet and to challenge themselves, they organize their own ventures," he says. [Many African Americans] often work a regular job and run their own businesses on the side," adds Lee.

DURHAM: THE BLACK WALL SWEET

"Black entrepreneurs here have learned to come up with an idea, go out and sell it, put themselves in the marketplace and then network with those who find their idea most valuable," says Lee, who now owns a pair of franchise concessions at the Midway terminal in the Raleigh-Durham Airport.

Not many other North Carolinians would know better than Lee. Besides his political career, he started a plastic injection molding company in the mid-'70s to produce filter rods for cigarettes for then R.J. Reynolds, now RJR/Nabisco. Lee sold the business in 1977 after making "a little profit."

Black North Carolinians have long since carved a proud tradition of entrepreneurialism. From the turn of the century through the '50s, Durham was known as the "Black Wall Street" because of its flourishing black business community. Three of those institutions-N.C. Mutual Insurance, Mechanics be Farmers Bank and Mutual Community Savings--continue to stand as examples of bedrock black businesses, surviving through depressions segregation an integration and now marketplace banstions.