Event: Maggie Anderson, chief executive officer and cofounder of the Empowerment Experiment Foundation, will discuss her new book “Our Black Year: A Tale of Buying Black in America’s Racially Divided Economy” at The University of Texas at Austin.
When: Friday, Feb. 25, 3-4 p.m.
Where: Texas Union Theatre, 2.228
Background: Anderson’s forthcoming book “Our Black Year” chronicles her family’s experiences after they embarked on a yearlong public pledge to “buy black,” which she called the Empowerment Experiment.
To help solve what she calls “the crisis in the black community,” Anderson and her husband spent their money for one year exclusively with black-owned businesses and encouraged African Americans across the nation to do the same.
Anderson will discuss how the experiment resulted in a national movement that inspired business owners, consumers, academics, professional and activist organizations. She will also share how it led to a landmark study conducted by Chicago’s Northwestern University Kellogg Graduate School of Management.
Since she started the Empowerment Experiment in 2009, Anderson has become the leader of a self-help economics movement that supports quality black businesses and urges consumers, especially other middle and upper class African Americans, to support them. She has appeared on CNN, MSNBC, Fox News and CBS Morning News, among many other national television and radio shows.
The event, hosted by Juliet Walker, professor of history, is sponsored by the Department of History, the John L.Warfield Center for African American Studies, the Department of African and African Diaspora Studies, the IC2 Institute and the Center for Black Business History, Entrepreneurship and Technology. The lecture is free and open to the public.
