- April 26, 2024
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New AAEC member Charlene Cothran talks to a fellow member. Photo by Ray Boone
AAEC Founder Leslie Giscombe and Palm Coast Mayor Milissa Holland. Photo by Ray Boone
AAEC member Michelle Gordon, who set up the networking event, chats with a fellow member of the club. Photo by Ray Boone
Members of the African American Entrepreneur’s Club and the community celebrated Black History Month with a networking event on the night of Monday, Feb. 26, at the African American Cultural Society Inc., located at 4422 N. U.S. Highway 1 in Palm Coast.
The club hosts workshops on a nightly basis but decided to do something special this month. In addition to networking, the AAEC showed a short documentary about Black Wall Street, a prominent concentration of African-American businesses in Tulsa, Oklahoma, that arose due to segregation in the early 20th century.
“If you take away individuals’ history from them and put them through what they have gone through, it’s very hard for them to dream and to aspire to do certain things,” AAEC Founder Leslie Giscombe said. “And that’s one of the reasons, by bringing that forth. It lets them realize that you can do it. It was done before. You just need a system to tap into.”
Giscombe said that there were more African American entrepreneurs in the U.S. 50 years ago than today. He said that increasing African American entrepreneurship benefits the whole community.
“There’s a lot of residuals from that: low crime rate, lower African American unemployment rate,” he said. “There’s a number that you can equate to it that makes it a positive for the community as a whole. And this is documented facts.”
