Initial Broadcast Date: January 25, 1971
60 minutes – Color
A new approach to black economic development is discussed in the program, which focuses on the work of the Inner City Business Improvement Forum (ICBIF), a non-profit, black-controlled economic development group in Detroit which aids and develops medium and large size manufacturing businesses. Since its inception following the Detroit civil disorders of July 1967, the organization has aided 100 black-owned companies with total assets of $5 million. Its goal is $1 billion in assets for the businesses it creates, plus 100,000 new jobs in the next 10 years.
ICBIF is committed to dividing profits within the community. Its policy is to aid only those black businesses which “broadly assist and strengthen the community,” according to its president Larry Doss.
Some of the companies ICBIF helped to create are: Renmuth, Inc., a large-scale metal stamping plant; Global Gourmet, Inc., a meat processing company; and the First Independence National Bank, Detroit’s first black-controlled bank. Officials from these firms appear on the program.
In another segment, Black Journal investigates the racial conflict in Cairo, Illinois, where blacks charge a white vigilante group with fire bombings and shooting attacks in black communities. Blacks, representing about half the population in this community of 10,000 persons, have been boycotting white-owned stores in the town since April 7, 1969, after they failed to win concessions from the white establishment. Interviewed in the film are: A.B. Thomas, Mayor of Cairo; the Rev. Charles Koen, executive director of the United Front (the organization which organized the boycott); Preston Ewing of the NAACP in Cairo; Wilbert Beard, a recently-resigned black police sergeant on the Cairo Police Force and Leon Perry, a black who directs the Governor’s office of information.
Black Journal #29 is a production of NET Division, Educational Broadcasting Corporation.
Executive producer: Tony Brown
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