Black business owners reflect on struggle and success as Juneteenth approaches

In the lead-up to Juneteenth, two Black business owners described their experiences in Paducah, reflecting on the obstacles they’ve had to overcome to keep their businesses healthy and growing.

Among these obstacles are a lack of community support and funding, which both businesses have struggled with since opening their doors.

Shanae Love started Love’s Vanity, a hair salon in Paducah, in 2016. As the mother of three daughters and the first business owner in her family, she hopes that the business will inspire her children to follow their own dreams.

“My daughter, she’s ventured off into entrepreneurship as well,” Love said, “so she sees the work that I put in.”

Though she wants to help her daughters achieve their goals, Love said that being a Black business owner is not easy. Many of the obstacles she’s faced involve community support.

“I love my clients, the diversity of my clients, being able to meet new people,” Love said, but most of her business’s exposure in the community comes through clients.

Love emphasized the importance of networking events, giving her a chance to showcase what her business does while learning about other minority-owned businesses.

“It’s important because you don’t see a lot of us around here, like, doing it,” Love said. “We want to create generational wealth as well.”

According to Love, these events could create a sense of community among minority business owners that would benefit everyone involved.

Charles Hamilton, whose family runs B.A.’s Automotive in Paducah, has experienced the same problem in his time at the auto repair shop.

Hamilton’s business is much older than Love’s. His brother, B. A. Hamilton, started the auto repair shop in 1969. Since then, Charles has seen Black-owned businesses in the community dwindle.

B.A.’s Automotive is a member of the Paducah Area Chamber of Commerce, an organization that often hosts networking events for businesses in McCracken County. Still, Hamilton said that the auto repair shop has struggled to hire new employees.

When his brother started the auto body repair program at West Kentucky Community and Technical College, B.A.’s Automotive had a steady pool of potential new hires to pull from.

Since then, changes in labor supply have made it difficult for B.A.’s to find new hires.

“It’s just a very shortage of Black auto body repairman,” he said. “White auto body and painters…, they feel different walking around with a B.A.’s Automotive shirt on.”

Sandra Wilson, the President and CEO of the Paducah Area Chamber of Commerce, said that the Chamber is focused on recruiting woman and minority-owned businesses of all sizes.

“We worked really hard to make sure that we have diverse representation on all of our committees,” she said. “We want to get the perspective of everyone in the community that’s involved with us.”

Wilson said that the Chamber used to sponsor minority-owned businesses by paying membership dues. Recently, funding for these sponsorships dried up.

Both Hamilton and Love have struggled with funding as well. Love said that her experience buying a home made her hesitant to seek lending support from a bank. As a result, she funded her business by herself.

Hamilton has seen other minority-owned business experiencing similar issues.

“Some of the banks have, at least one I know, has said they was interested in promoting minority businesses,” Hamilton said, “but you know, that’s very easy to say.”

Despite these common obstacles, Love encouraged Black business owners to persist.

“Don’t stop, because you will incur obstacles along the way,” she said. “You just have to just keep going, keep pushing forward.”