American publishing magnate Earl Graves (born 1935) launched his empire in 1972 with Black Enterprise magazine. Coming less than a decade after new U.S. federal civil rights legislation had been enacted, the magazine soon became the standard-bearer for upwardly mobile African Americans.

Working-Class Family Upbringing

Graves was born in Brooklyn, New York, on January 9, 1935, and grew up in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood. His father worked as a shipping clerk in New York's garment district. Bedford-Stuyvesant, far from the nightclubs and jazz of Harlem, was home to many similar working-class black families. Many owned their own homes, as Graves later pointed out in an interview with Los Angeles Times writer Lee Romney. "I swept the sidewalk once a day and God forbid if I didn't bring the garbage cans in after the garbage had been collected," he recalled. "From that environment came the idea of wanting to do something of my...