Brothers launch Black Business School to empower Black entrepreneurs

Dr. Boyce Watkins, former professor of finance at Syracuse University and his brother Lawrence Watkins, who has an MBA form Cornell University, have created the Black Business School to assist African Americans in becoming financially independence. BBS provides courses that endorse and teach the mindset of being more than a consumer. The school aims to educate and coach Black Americans on everything from the importance of saving to investing in their own businesses. “We recognized the problem with the way business education is taught in the United States, especially for the Black community,” Lawrence Watkins told Rolling Out earlier this month. “Before we started the Black Business School, Boyce was a professor of finance at Syracuse University and through that position he realized that there was an immense lack of diversity and resources for African Americans both from the faculty and student perspective. Boyce [is] a public scholar and public intellectual and he [wanted] to educate Black students better in [relation] to business education. So, we took Boyce’s audience to create a platform for African Americans to help them obtain a culturally relevant yet practical education in [finance]. That’s how the Black Business School started in September of 2015.” The brothers say that saving and investing are the real keys that separate financial winners from losers in today’s economic world. Find more information about the school and how anyone can take classes here.