Top: Rashad Johnson, Diane Brown and Aaron Rogers. Bottom: A moment from last year's Black Wall Street Festival. Lucy Gellman Photos.
An economic development summit that centers Black voices, and celebrates the growth they have enabled in New Haven. A mixer for Black businesses, with arts and culture that are vibrant and alive enough to match the conversation. A day-long festival on the New Haven Green, where over 200 Black vendors, artists and entrepreneurs are the heartbeat of the day’s festivities.
All of those are coming to New Haven this week, as the Black Wall Street Festival (BWS Fest) returns to the city for the fourth summer in a row. Organized by The Breed Ent. and the city’s Department of Arts, Culture & Tourism with several collaborators, this year’s event features an economic summit at Southern Connecticut State University (SCSU), an entrepreneur party Friday night, and an eight-hour festival on the Green to kick off the weekend.
The main event takes place this Saturday, August 16; a full website of events is available here. The timing falls during both Black August, a decades-deep celebration of Black revolutionaries, and National Black Business Month, as well as in a summer of downtown festivals that has also included Seeing Sounds, New Haven Open Streets and the Puerto Rican Festival.
The Breed is the mellifluous brainchild of Aaron “Y.A.” Rogers and Rashad “Snacks” Johnson, Grammy-winning artists and music producers who founded the company in 2009, and added its not-for-profit arm, The Breed Academy, in 2020. Both grew up in New Haven; both stayed in part to make a difference in the place that raised them.
“From the beginning, we've done everything from the ground up,” Rogers said at a press conference Monday morning on the Green. “So I think naturally, we just adapted that to the Black Wall Street Festival. It's about instilling confidence in Black businesses, that you don't need any help other than your community to do what you need to do. We're empowering them and educating them and letting them know that we all have each other.”
This year, that begins on Thursday afternoon, as Communities for Generations, Inc. (CFG) hosts its third annual economic development summit, “The Audacity to Build” at the Adanti Student Center at SCSU. Held over an action-packed four hours at the university, the event includes multiple panels and workshops around community resource sharing, from Black business founders like Rashaan Boyd, Kristen Threatt and Renee Brown to a keynote from Kebra Smith-Bolden, the founder and general manager of LIT New Haven.
One panel, for instance, features Erik Clemons, Howard K. Hill and Karen DuBois-Walton in a discussion around creating wealth and power within the Black community that can last for generations to come. Another, from former State Rep. Robyn Porter, offers a “live strategy lab” where people can gather, connect, and bounce ideas off of both each other and professionals in the field. While the summit is now in its third year, it is the first that Communities for Generations has worked with BWS Fest.
Arden Santana and Hafeeza Turé of Communities for Generations, Inc.
“We’re grateful to be able to extend our reach to our younger generations, who need to pick up the torch to let our seniors rest in this civic engagement space,” said Arden Santana, director of educational programs for the organization. “And we can do that through Black Wall Street’s support with that people power.”
“I feel like this is a movement,” added Hafeeza Turé, director of Health & Wellness Initiatives at the organization. The night will also honor several awardees, including Stetson Branch Manager Diane Brown, who carried the Elm City Freddy Fixer Parade through multiple iterations; CPEN founder and Newhallville booster Doreen Abubukar; Newhallville Fresh Starts founder Marcus Harvin; More Amour Boutique owner Kim Poole; the LAB at ConnCORP Director Jahkeeva Morgan; and Kobéy Enterprises’ Kobéy Smith.
On Friday, BWS Fest continues with an entrepreneur party at the Canal Dock Boathouse, with both networking and a performance from the R&B artist Vedo. Then on Saturday, the main event begins at noon on the New Haven Green. In addition to vendors, the day-long fest will have family-friendly activities, food vendors, and several artists on the city’s stage, just as it has in years past.
This year, organizers are expecting over 250 vendors and over 10,000 people, said Mayor Justin Elicker. Shouting out the small Black-owned businesses that make New Haven a more vibrant place to live, he pointed to the high return on investment that comes from supporting local entrepreneurs.
Mayor Justin Elicker: "It also creates a more resilient economy in particular for individuals who have historically been undermined," he said.
Often, those business owners live and work in New Haven, meaning that the dollars they earn go right back into the city they call home. Sometimes, that’s much bigger than a financial transaction: vendors in past years have included artists, activists, mental health practitioners, and social service providers. All of them make New Haven into the city that it is.
“It’s a testament to the work that so many people behind me are doing to make sure that we support Black-owned businesses in New Haven,” Elicker said, tying the city’s support for Black Wall Street to a wider investment in inclusive growth. “And we ensure that New Haven’s pride in our cultural diversity is on display for everyone to enjoy.”
Nothing has happened in a silo, Rogers and Johnson added in a conversation after the press conference. Four years ago, it would have been impossible to launch the event without city support, and particularly former Cultural Affairs Director Adriane Jefferson. At the time, it was still in Temple Plaza, with 35 vendors and a single day of activities. That afternoon was so successful that there was the momentum to repeat it the following year on the Green.
Since that time, the list of collaborators has grown, with partners like the New Haven Equitable Entrepreneurial Ecosystem (NHE3), ConnCAT and its for-profit subsidiary, ConnCORP, and the Center for Inclusive Growth. So has the festival’s footprint, from 150 vendors in 2023 to over 200 last August. For the first time last summer, the festival itself was also the culmination of a week of events, including an artist showcase, film festival, investment summit, entrepreneur party and fashion show.
It’s also meant to be a reclamation. The term “Black Wall Street” references the history, often overlooked and undertaught, of self-sustaining Black business districts in the twentieth century. Between 1900 and 1970, many of those became the targets of devastating violence at the hands of white people.
Diane X. Brown, who runs Black Urban Librarian Consulting.
While the most well-known example may be the Greenwood neighborhood in Tulsa, Oklahoma, which in 1921 was burned to the ground by a white mob, there are several others: Oscarville, Georgia; South Durham, North Carolina; a self-sustaining section of Birmingham, Alabama where Klansmen bombed the 16th Street Baptist Church, killing four young Black girls, in 1963.
Partly because of that history, “it’s a duty” to show up and support Black vendors, organizers and artists on Saturday, Santana said in an interview after the press conference.
As BWS Fest arrives in New Haven, its goal is also to foster some of the same community connection and mutual support that once enabled those neighborhoods to thrive. Johnson, who grew up in New Haven, said that’s one of his favorite parts of the day itself: he sees people reconnecting on the Green, sometimes after decades of drifting apart.
“I think it hits us the most when our families talk about how they haven't seen their friends from the 70s or the 80s, and they get to see them at an event that Aaron, Adriane and I created,” he said, smiling at the sun-soaked Green around him. Nearby, the stage from the city’s Puerto Rican Festival stood empty, the music and buzz from Saturday still an echo in the air.
“Exactly,” Rogers added. “It’s a big cookout.”
Sienna McLean and her mom, cultural affairs commissioner and BLOOM owner and founder Alisha Crutchfield. The "Black Girls Are Sunshine" design is a nod to artist-entrepreneur and poet Sun Queen, who founded the brand several years ago.
It comes at a time when Black voices and Black people are under siege on a national level. Since taking office in January of this year, President Donald Trump has actively worked to attack diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts in every sector of the American workplace and civic sphere, from loans to Black farmers and Black businesses to the teaching of Black history itself.
What undergirds that violence—the economic disinvestment in and disenfranchisement of Black communities—is the same kind of white supremacy that led to the destruction and erasure of Black Wall Streets across the country barely a full century ago. It has opened what some, like the scholar Nikole Hannah-Jones, have called “a new era of unchecked discrimination” in the U.S., levels of which may not have been seen since before the Civil Rights Act in 1965.
Diane Brown, who runs Black Urban Librarian Consulting, praised the festival as an antidote to that kind of erasure. Growing up in New Haven, “we had things for us by us,” she said. But “I’ve never seen anything of this magnitude.” As an elder in the community, she’s spent years working to foster intergenerational connections, from her transformative tenure at the Stetson Branch Library to her work with the Freddy Fixer Parade. She sees Rogers and Johnson taking up that mantle.
“When you step back from the New Haven Green and you see a sea of Black people selling and vending and networking and communicating, it’s a powerful thing,” she said. “Especially for the younger generations to see. If it can happen here, it can happen in our daily lives. I just want to applaud them, because I know this is not an easy task.”
As one of the city’s cultural affairs commissioners and a small business owner herself, BLOOM founder Alisha Crutchfield urged New Haveners to not just attend and support Black-owned businesses, but to cheer on all of the event’s vendors, even those who they may not buy something from. Monday, she had come out with her 8-year-old daughter, Sienna, to show her just a slice of that community power. The two will be back Saturday, she said: they wouldn’t miss it.
“Buy from as many of these small Black-owned businesses that you can, and then acknowledge the ones that you don’t,” she said. “Show them some love. Make eye contact. Let these creatives, these dreamers know that we see them out here, dreaming out loud.”
“The money is vital to a small business, but the community support—that hits different,” she added. “That empowers us entrepreneurs.”