For some business owners, signs show solidarity — and provide protection | Real

By Realestates News On Oct 19, 2024

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PHILADELPHIA — As looting spread from Center City two weekends ago, the Scurry family became desperate to protect La’Vanter, their women’s clothing boutique in North Philadelphia.

Ninety percent of sales had disappeared during the coronavirus pandemic, and another hit could finish their small company, near Broad and Erie. Jamil Scurry, a store owner and former Philadelphia police officer, grabbed a large piece of vinyl and spray-painted it with the words he hoped would spare their store:

It worked. Nearby businesses were broken into that weekend, Jamil Scurry said, but his family’s store was left undamaged.

As protests in this city, and across the country spread, gaining momentum each day, some black business owners put up hastily-composed signs, showing solidarity with protesters and hoping their identity would provide protection.

“It sends a message that black-owned businesses are important and needed,” Scurry said a week later, the sign still in front of his store. “It’s important for the African American community to build each other up and be able to pass down wealth. That’s something that we haven’t been able to do. White America has been able to pass down generational wealth so that makes it easier for the next generation.”

These signs have appeared repeatedly during the modern civil-rights era. During the 1965 upheaval in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles, some black-owned businesses avoided property loss by putting signs in their windows that said “blood brother.” During destruction in Detroit in 1967 sparked by police violence, black businesspeople wrote “soul brother” on their windows. After Martin Luther King Jr., was assassinated in 1968 and people erupted in Washington, D.C, Stokely Carmichael, later known as Kwame Ture, led demonstrators to U Street to protect black-owned Ben’s Chili Bowl.

“What are the protesters angry about? Why does something get destroyed and not others? The signs are explaining [it] to you,” Donna Murch, a Rutgers University history professor, said about the signs that have appeared during unrest that has accompanied some civil rights protests. “People are targeting property as a way to fight social forces. That is what distinguishes it.”

The Rev. Mark Kelly Tyler, a pastor at Philadelphia’s Mother Bethel AME Church near Sixth and Pine Street, cautioned against oversimplifying people’s motivations for taking to the streets, and in some cases, turning to destruction.

“Certainly there were people who were there because they just wanted to steal and that’s just who they are, but there were other people there who were driven by other types of forces,” he said. “The moment we keep this simple — it’s black, it’s white, it’s good, it’s bad — then we miss what the real learning is in this…