• Jay King is the CEO and president of the California Black Chamber of Commerce, the largest Black nonprofit business organization.
• He and the CBCC have dedicated themselves to supporting Black small businesses affected by the pandemic by organizing fundraisers and visiting stores and owners across the state.
• He pointed out a big problem in the lending process, which puts Black businesses at a disadvantage to get funding or loans.
• "The systemic racism in the lending business has been part of what has stifled African-American businesses from growing, whether it was high interest lending practices, complete denial of loans, or preconceived biases that made the hurdle too high to clear," he said. 
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Jay King wears a lot of hats — all of them important ones. He's the CEO and president of the California Black Chamber of Commerce (CBCC), a role that he's held since June 2019 for the largest Black nonprofit business organization, representing hundreds of small and emerging businesses, affiliates, and chambers of commerce throughout California. He's also on the Sacramento Community Police Review Commission and a business leader and community activist in both Sacramento and Los Angeles. 

He's even a Grammy Award-winning music artist and record label executive, having won a Grammy as part of an American R&B group, Club Nouveau, that he founded. And for the past 11 years, King has shared his insight on politics and pop culture on his radio show, "Kings in the Morning" and acted as a radio personality on the CBCC's community station, KDEE, in Sacramento, mixing classic R&B music with community activism every Tuesday through Thursday.   

King explained that this latter role has been key to his larger work and vision. 

"It gave me a voice in the community, and I used that voice to empower the community, inform the community, and entice the community to do and be better," he said.

In the last year, King has worked tirelessly as an advocate for Black small business owners, sitting on the Cal Trans Small Business Council as well holding seats on the Small Business Advisory Council for the Department of General Services and the California High Speed Rail and acting as organizer of the North Sacramento Leadership Council and founder and spokesperson for the Greater Sacramento Financial Literacy Group. 

King is no stranger to the type of situation that led to George Floyd's death. In 2016 in Sacramento, he was at the forefront of organizing an effort that included demanding and helping to secure a new police chief after an incident of police misconduct and violence. 

"The Joseph Mann murder was a turning point for our city," King explained. "To watch police officers who are sworn to serve and protect the community terrorize and hunt down a mentally ill community member in their patrol car and trap him against a fence with nowhere to go and gun him down with over 17 gunshot wounds to his body like he was a vicious animal, it was criminal in every sense of the word."  

The fact that the police chief allowed this behavior set off a spark, and the community "sounded off," said King. Watching what has taken place in Minneapolis with Floyd's killing brings back "bad memories of what bad, criminal policing looks like," he added. 

King and the CBCC focus on fundraising and collecting federal funding for Black small businesses

As a first step to respond to the economic devastation of the pandemic and civil unrest after Floyd's death, King initiated a GoFundMe campaign to raise money for businesses in California.  

"I felt we had to do something, and calling on our community to support the businessman and woman in our community seemed to me the only way we had a chance of saving them," King said.

He added, "We have the weakest economic engine in the country, as more than 95% of African-American businesses are mostly sole proprietorships or partnerships with no paid employees. The possibilities of African-American small business owners getting a loan from banking institutions is slim to none. You couple that with the shutting down of an economy, that only spells disaster for this community." 

He said that the CARES Act "missed the boat" for Black small business owners. 

"[T]hey didn't have the resources or banker relationships to muscle their way to the front of the line like big business," King explained. "Most African-American businesses are mom-and-pop shops, and there was no training or education on how to apply for the PPP."

He added that the Congressional Black Caucus — which fights to empower marginalized communities and includes most of the Black members of the US Congress — was only able to muster up $10 million of grant money for the 2.6 million Black small business owners across the US, "so if each business received equal dollars they would each receive less than $4," King said.  

Alongside the GoFundMe, King prioritized visiting 10 to 15 businesses a day, interacting with business owners across the state of California to assess their needs while offering support and fundraising. 

"A new business owner with a new emergency, lots of fear with the cities starting to reopen, and the debts that had been put on pause now about to come due," King said, "it is quite overwhelming and troubling. Some are folding never to be back again; others are still holding on hoping relief is just around the corner." King added that this is even more devastating for the many sole proprietors who rely on their businesses to cover basic living expenses. 

Because cities are getting federal dollars for COVID-19, King explained that the CBCC is positioning itself to get a piece of this money to spread to businesses in the state's communities — as well as taking the fundraising money and spreading it to as many of the Black businesses across the state as possible. 

"We are hoping humanity will prevail and in doing so will cause these United States of America to do something it's never done to or for the Black community, and that is be fair," King said.

A change in the lending process and a focus on grants

The first step business owners, government officials, and other leaders can take to support Black business owners is to "not just say they understand and they know there's systemic racism — there has to be an action that shows it," said King. 

"This fact has to be addressed, and the very agencies put in place to protect, foster, develop, and help small business people must be magnified times 10-plus in their efforts to amend the problem," King said. "The crimes, biases, and prejudices that have existed in this country have been crippling and egregious in causing the African-American small business community to suffer."

He added that to truly help Black business owners, it's important to decide that whatever help received will be in the form of a grant, not a loan. 

"We have to be honest enough to say the lending practices that exist and existed have been overwhelmingly devastating to the African-American business community," King said. "The systemic racism in the lending business has been part of what has stifled African-American businesses from growing, whether it was high interest lending practices, complete denial of loans, or preconceived biases that made the hurdle too high to clear."  

However, he added that he's not in favor of a free-for-all money grab — real criteria must first be put in place. He suggested that concerned businesses should partner with reputable Black organizations — like Black Chambers of Commerce, Black media groups, and radio and social influencers — who do outreach in urban communities. 

"We can't do it like before," King said. "I am very excited to see new thoughts and conversations about this matter coming to the forefront, and I personally look forward to networking and creating a sustainable new future for the many small business owners I serve."  

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