Black-owned businesses saw a surge of support after George Floyd’s murder. Since then? Not so much. – The Boston Globe

Rose Staram officially launched her Dorchester-based event production company RoseMark Production in June 2019. Staram said her business benefited from waves of support in 2021 and 2022, especially from large companies reflecting on racial disparities in their vendors. In 2023, however, she said, the backing receded significantly when much of corporate America interpreted the Supreme Court’s striking down of affirmative action in college admissions to mean companies could no longer set diversity-based purchasing or hiring goals.

“It’s just been kind of dropped by the wayside, which is a little bit of a scary thing,” she said.

Teresa Maynard, owner of Sweet Teez bakery in Boston, said sales still soar every Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Juneteenth, and throughout Black History Month in February.

“That’s amazing, but after that month, we still want to be on the vendor list,” she said.

Google searches for the term “Black owned” skyrocketed in May 2020 and plummeted shortly after, with smaller peaks around Juneteenth and Black History Month in subsequent years, Google data show.

“If you ask most Black-owned businesses, we kind of figured that was going to happen,” said Kamaal Jarrett, founder of Hillside Harvest, a Boston-based Caribbean condiment company. “I was cautiously optimistic, but knew that we would probably have to weather the storm of some cycle of ups and downs over the next couple of years, which has pretty much been true to form.”

After launching Hillside Harvest in 2019, Jarrett’s products were being sold by several retailers in early 2020, though online sales to consumers were slow. His sales exploded in the aftermath of Floyd’s death, with revenue growing 17 percent from 2020 to 2021. He said at one point, he was receiving emails almost daily pitching potential deals as part of corporate diversity efforts.

“I can’t tell you when the last email I got like that was,” he said, “But that’s OK. We didn’t want the only reason that people were doing business with us to be because we were Black-owned.”

By 2022, however, the company’s annual revenue fell 27 percent, online shopping sessions plummeted 57 percent, and total orders dropped 39 percent, Jarrett said, far from the level of interest the year before.

Quontay Turner opened Emerald City plant shop in Norwood in 2021. She said monthly sales grossed $18,500 on average that year. But in 2022, they fell to $16,000. In 2023, they dropped to about $13,000, Turner said, attributing the downturn to both a decline in consumers’ intentional support of Black-owned businesses and general economic pressures, such as inflation.

“Regardless of what the market is doing,” she said, “we always have to support Black and brown businesses, because we’re historically at a disadvantage.”

When Jae’da Turner launched Black Owned Bos., the organization behind the Seaport markets, in 2019, it started as an Instagram page showcasing Black-owned businesses. It gradually drew 3,000 followers.

Then, after Floyd’s killing, 10,000 people followed Black Owned Bos.’s account in two weeks. To harness the momentum, Turner launched the markets and published an online directory of local Black-owned businesses, with many seeing a surge in sales. Black Owned Bos. also now runs business-networking programs and a storefront in the South End, which opened in 2022 and sells items from local Black-owned brands.

Her Instagram following has continued to grow, but at a slower rate. After those “irregular” years of 2020 and 2021, many Black entrepreneurs returned to their regular day jobs, herself included, Turner said, noting some businesses shuttered.

“As a small business owner, you’re like, ‘Oh my God, that [support] was so great,’” Turner said, but “with a shift in economy, shift in perspective, shift in trends and interest and priority, it can be a challenge for some businesses.”

Turner’s efforts are part of a raft of initiatives by racial justice advocates to contend with Boston’s striking racial wealth gap. A 2022 Urban Institute analysis estimated that Black residents in Boston have a net worth of $11,000, compared to white residents’ net worth of about $215,000.

Black entrepreneurship is crucial to addressing this inequity, said Nicole Obi, executive director of the Black Economic Council of Massachusetts. Black business owners have 10 times more net worth than other employed Black adults, she said.

According to 2021 data published by the Federal Reserve Banks, white business owners were more than twice as likely as Black ones to be fully approved for business loans.

Despite those challenges, Black business ownership has grown at historic rates, with 11 percent of Black households owning a business in 2022, up from 5 percent in 2019, according to the US Small Business Administration.

All those companies need support, Obi said, such as officials improving the diversity of government contractors and scaling up grant programs. But consumers, she said, also play a key role.

“Nobody starts a business to get a grant,” Obi said, adding: “If nobody’s buying from them, it’s not going to make a difference.”

During the recent market day, some customers sought out the Black-Owned Bos. market, but others happened upon it.

Kei Slaughter and their partner Ziggy Wedderburn, who are both Black and 37, said they found the market through looking for ways to support Black-owned businesses.

Since moving here from New Orleans two years ago, Slaughter said it’s been “harder to find Black spaces, Black community that I align with.”

Meanwhile, Linda Aveyard, 57, and Anthony Aveyard, 61, who are both white, stopped at the market while visiting from Western Massachusetts to see their sons.

“We always try to shop small whenever we can, regardless of the race,” Linda Aveyard said.

Community is crucial for Black entrepreneurs, said Kai Grant, founder of Black Market Nubian, a Roxbury-based event space and marketplace featuring Black-owned brands’ products that started in 2017 to help address the racial wealth gap.

“We have created this idea that there could be a pathway towards ownership, a pathway towards founding something,” she said.

Stella Tannenbaum can be reached at stella.tannenbaum@globe.com.