An indispensable business
Fighting the good fight
[Reprinted from Issues & Views October 22, 2001]
A Slice of History - When we were colored
In Atlanta, in the late 1920s, as black businessman Heman Perry's enterprises were failing and he began to sell off some of them, two entrepreneurs bought out one of his pharmacies on Auburn Avenue. The men, Lorimer Milton and Clayton Yates, were establishing themselves in an already thriving black business community. They were determined to make any businesses they opened so appealing that their customers would not be tempted to shop in the downtown white district, thereby transferring the much-needed circulation of money out of the hands of black business people.
Not only were their new store's fixtures and furnishings kept up to the modern standards of the day, the two owners made sure that they stocked every product that was available in the downtown stores. The Yates & Milton Drugstore provided all kinds of extra services, and customers could pay their utility bills there and buy postage stamps and even mail packages. Less than a year after it was renovated and opened under the new ownership, a local newspaper deemed Yates & Milton a "smashing success," and the drug store was on its way to becoming an indispensable part of the busy Auburn shopping district. In African-American Business Leaders, biographers Ingham and Feldman quote Lorimer Milton:
On Sunday, my Lord, you couldn't get in the drugstore for the people piled in there. After one year, we were opening our second drugstore, on the west side. In subsequent years we opened three more stores until we had five drugstores in the city of Atlanta. No white chain in this town had as many drugstores as we had.
This was a period when blacks who were in a position to pool resources to develop the communities in which they lived did so, since they knew it was their responsibility, and no outsiders were going to pick up the slack. It was sink or swim, and a great many blacks chose to swim.
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