The seven days of Kwanzaa are celebrated over the course of the week following Christmas, and the fourth day is dedicated to the principle of Ujamaa – or cooperative economics.
About 50 people gathered Tuesday at the Episcopal Church of Saints Andrew and Matthew in Wilmington to hear from more than a dozen black business owners and light Kwanzaa candles.
There are so many black businesses in Wilmington, said Chevala Oliver, who owns one of them. “We haven’t learned to connect the dots,” she said, explaining why events like the one celebrating Ujamaa are important for spreading the word throughout the community and encouraging people to support the businesses in their neighborhoods.
Oliver has a small greeting card company inspired by her mother, who died of breast cancer in 1988. In the months before her mother’s death, Oliver noticed that people didn’t know how to talk about cancer. So, years later, she launched a line of greeting cards with colorfully drawn women – one in a flapper dress, another in bell bottoms – and messages inside that help people express their feeling to women who have been diagnosed with cancer. None of the drawing have faces, though, “because cancer doesn’t have a face,” Oliver said.
Her hope is that her cards will take the fear out of talking about cancer, but she also has ambitions to build her business – “I want to be a Hallmark,” she said – and she wants to support others in her community. Seeing some of the other business owners in the crowd, Oliver said, “we can get quality services from people who look just like me.”
Among the other business owners were a funeral director, a lawyer, two insurance brokers, and a heating oil provider.
Jimmy Gooding, who started Gooding Heating and Fuel Oil 37 years ago, runs the only African-American owned heating oil company in Delaware.
“We must support one another,” he told the room, which greeted him with cheers and applause.
“That’s my oil man,” shouted Kamau Ngom, who stood up from his seat with the band, where he was playing the shekere, a large, dried gourd covered with a web of beads.
Gooding had worked for another heating oil company, where he learned how run a successful business, before striking out on his own. The secret to success, he said, is to “be competitive and treat your customers very nice.”
Gooding’s company is based in Wilmington and serves a 50-mile radius, he said.
On the newer end of the business spectrum was Leonard Young, who started a website called delawareblack.com about 10 years ago. Young had grown up in Wilmington and moved away for college – when he came back, he saw that there was no place to go where you could find out what was going on in the black community. So he launched a website that has an events calendar, a business directory, and job postings.
Kwanzaa concludes Friday.
Contact Saranac Hale Spencer at (302) 324-2909,sspencer@delawareonline.com or on Twitter @SSpencerTNJ.
