Owning Something Means More Than Having Your Name on It
I grew up in a generation where owning something meant something. A house was something you tried to own. A car was something you eventually hoped to pay off. A business was something you built so that the income, decisions, and future belonged to you. Today we live in a world of subscriptions, leases, memberships, loans, and recurring payments. We have access to more things than ever, but sometimes we own less of what we use. That is why the message of Dr. Claud Anderson still catches people’s attention. His argument is not merely that Black people should own more individual things. He has spent decades arguing that Black communities need stronger control over the entire economic process. Who produces the product? Who owns the business? Who distributes it? Who employs the workers? And after we spend the money, whose hands are holding it next?
Before PowerNomics, There Was Safe Bus
To understand where some of that thinking comes from, go back to Winston-Salem, North Carolina, in 1926. Segregation shaped almost every part of life, including transportation. The city’s trolley system did not adequately serve the Black neighborhoods where many workers lived. Black residents still had to get to tobacco factories and other jobs, so independent Black jitney drivers stepped into the gap. They operated small buses and automobiles for paying passengers. But those drivers were also competing with one another for the same nickel fares. Routes overlapped. Rivalries developed. What they had individually was useful, but what they could build together was much more powerful. That realization changed the history of transportation in Winston-Salem.
Twenty-One Men Came Together
On April 24, 1926, twenty-one Black jitney operators met in a small office in the Lincoln Theatre Building on Church Street. Clarence T. Woodland had called the meeting because the scattered transportation system needed organization. The drivers decided to stop operating only as competitors and begin building something collectively. They eventually formed the Safe Bus Company. The name came from a commitment made to Winston-Salem’s mayor that they would operate a safer and more organized transportation service. That part matters because Safe Bus was not born simply from somebody having a clever business idea. It grew out of exclusion. The regular transportation system was not adequately serving Black neighborhoods, so Black entrepreneurs created their own. Segregation created the problem, and Black cooperation created the response.
Cooperation Changed the Scale
The Safe Bus founders demonstrated something we still struggle with today. Twenty-one people competing individually had limited power. Twenty-one people pooling resources could build an institution. WUNC reports that the operators raised approximately $100,000 by selling stock and began operating the company in 1926. Safe Bus grew into a substantial enterprise with dozens of buses, more than eighty drivers, and thousands of daily passengers. At its height, it carried about 8,000 passengers per day. That is not a little neighborhood side business. It was transportation infrastructure. These men did not merely own vehicles. Together, they owned routes, employment, operations, customer relationships, and part of the economic movement of an entire community. That is the difference between owning a thing and participating in an economic ecosystem.
Let Me Correct the Five-Hundred-Bus Story
I have heard the story told that Safe Bus eventually operated more than five hundred buses. I could not verify that number, and the strongest historical sources point in another direction. The North Carolina Transportation Museum says the original jitney operation became a fleet of thirty-five city buses. Other local records indicate the fleet had grown to forty-two buses by 1935. The company eventually employed more than eighty drivers. Those numbers may not sound as dramatic as five hundred buses, but they do not need exaggeration. A Black-owned transit company carrying thousands of passengers a day in the segregated South was extraordinary on its own. Good history should make us proud without requiring us to enlarge the numbers. The truth is powerful enough.
They Built More Than Transportation
Safe Bus became a source of enormous pride in Winston-Salem’s Black community. The company employed Black drivers and supported Black economic activity at a time when many opportunities were deliberately restricted. By 1940, Safe Bus had a three-story headquarters, and historical accounts describe other businesses operating in the building, including a grocery store and beauty shop. That detail gets my attention. Now we are no longer simply talking about buses. We are talking about an institution becoming an anchor for other economic activity. One enterprise can create employment. Employees spend money. Supporting businesses appear. Property becomes useful. Skills are developed. That is how an economic ecosystem begins to form.
Then Safe Bus Began Carrying Everybody
For much of its history, segregation restricted where Safe Bus operated. But an interesting thing happened in 1968. The private company serving the rest of Winston-Salem stopped operating. Safe Bus was then called upon to provide service across the entire city. Suddenly the Black-owned company that had been created because Black residents were underserved was transporting people throughout Winston-Salem. White passengers were now riding a Black-owned transit system. That fact matters. Black enterprise was not merely serving Black customers. It had become important enough to provide a public service to the broader city. At its peak, Safe Bus earned recognition as the largest African American-owned and operated transportation business in the world.
We Were Not Always Just Customers
That is the part of this history I want younger people to understand. Black Americans have never existed in this country only as consumers. We have been builders, owners, manufacturers, farmers, bankers, insurers, publishers, transportation operators, tradespeople, and entrepreneurs. Sometimes we owned the route. Safe Bus is a beautiful example because its success was visible every day. People did not need a lecture about Black economic cooperation. They could watch the buses coming down the street. Children could see Black drivers earning wages from a Black-owned company. Adults could buy stock. Families could see what cooperation looked like when it became an institution. Economic education was rolling past the front porch.
The Company Eventually Disappeared
Safe Bus operated from 1926 until 1972. Its ending is also part of the lesson. As transportation became integrated, automobile ownership increased, ridership changed, and the company faced new financial pressures. Historical accounts note that some white passengers resisted riding the Black-operated system after Safe Bus began serving the entire city. The company eventually struggled financially. In 1972, Winston-Salem purchased Safe Bus’s assets, retained its staff, and incorporated the operation into what became the Winston-Salem Transit Authority. The buses continued moving, but the ownership changed. That distinction is exactly the kind of thing Dr. Anderson would later emphasize. Service can survive while control disappears.
Ownership Changes the Conversation
That is why ownership matters so much in economic discussions. A job gives you income. Ownership can give you income, equity, control, and something that can survive beyond your individual labor. That does not mean everybody needs to become an entrepreneur. Economies require workers, professionals, managers, public servants, and specialists too. But communities with little ownership can find themselves producing enormous amounts of labor and consumption while building very little collective wealth. The paycheck enters the community and immediately leaves it. Somebody outside the community owns the grocery store, bank, insurance company, apartment building, distribution company, and commercial property. The community works and buys but does not own enough of what connects those activities. That is the economic question Anderson keeps pushing people to examine.
Enter Dr. Claud Anderson
Dr. Claud Anderson would later become one of the most recognizable advocates of Black economic self-sufficiency. His official PowerNomics organization describes his ideas as strategies for Black Americans to pool resources so they can produce, distribute, and consume in ways that create wealth. His message did not emerge simply from reading economic theories in a university library. His work reflects academic study, business experience, public service, and a broader historical interest in Black ownership and racial inequality. He went on to write books including Black Labor, White Wealth, Dirty Little Secrets About Black History, and PowerNomics: The National Plan to Empower Black America. Different people may agree or disagree with parts of his analysis. But the central question he asks is difficult to ignore: what happens to the money after Black people earn and spend it?
Government Taught Him Another Lesson
Anderson also spent time inside government. Biographical accounts identify him as Florida’s State Coordinator of Education under Governor Reubin Askew during the 1970s. Later, during the Carter administration, he served as federal co-chairman of a regional commission involving Southeastern governors, with a rank equivalent to assistant secretary in the Department of Commerce. That placed him around government budgets and economic-development programs. Government can direct enormous resources. It can fund businesses, infrastructure, education, and development. But political administrations change. Priorities change. Budgets change. A program supported by one administration can disappear under another. Ownership operates differently because an asset can continue beyond the person who originally created it.
PowerNomics Is a Bigger Idea Than Buying Black
People sometimes reduce PowerNomics to “Buy Black.” That misses much of Anderson’s argument. His own organization describes the concept in terms of producing, distributing, and consuming, with an emphasis on pooling resources and building greater economic self-sufficiency. Buying from a Black-owned business can matter, but what if the business owns none of its supply chain? Who manufactured the product? Who owns the building? Who finances the company? Who distributes the goods? Who owns the intellectual property? Who insures the business? Those questions move the conversation from shopping toward economic structure. A community becomes stronger economically when it participates in several stages of the process rather than appearing only at the cash register.
Safe Bus Was an Example Before There Was a Name
That is why Safe Bus makes such a good illustration of the principle. Twenty-one men brought their separate operations together. They raised capital. They organized transportation. They created employment. They served customers. They built infrastructure. They developed management. They created an institution the broader city eventually depended upon. Nobody in 1926 called it PowerNomics. The term did not exist. But the practical lesson resembles what Anderson would later preach: cooperation can transform scattered individual effort into collective economic capacity. The concept was not invented by a book. Black communities had practiced versions of it long before anybody gave it a modern name.
Do Not Romanticize Segregation
There is one thing we have to be careful about when telling stories of successful Black businesses during segregation. Their success should never be used to make segregation sound beneficial. Safe Bus existed partly because racist exclusion created a transportation need. Black people should never have been denied equal access in the first place. Segregation forced Black communities to create institutions because many white institutions refused to serve them fairly. Some of those Black businesses became extraordinary success stories. That demonstrates Black ingenuity. It does not redeem segregation. We can celebrate what Black people built without becoming nostalgic for the injustice that made building it necessary.
Integration Brought Gains and Losses
This history also reveals something more complicated about integration. Integration was morally and legally necessary because Black Americans had the right to access public institutions, businesses, schools, housing, and employment on equal terms. But integration also changed the economic geography of Black communities. Money that once had fewer places to go outside segregated communities suddenly had many more options. Some Black-owned institutions survived. Others struggled or disappeared. That does not mean integration was a mistake. It means freedom changed markets as well as civil rights. Understanding that helps explain why economic integration did not automatically produce equal ownership.
Buying Power Is Not the Same as Economic Power
We often hear large numbers describing Black buying power. Those figures sound impressive. But spending power and ownership power are not identical. You can spend billions while owning very little of the system receiving those billions. Consumers can make businesses wealthy without acquiring any ownership in them. That is why Anderson focuses so intensely on production and control. Consumption creates revenue for somebody. The economic question is who. When the dollar leaves your hand, does it circulate through businesses connected to your community, or does it leave almost immediately? The answer does not require everybody to shop exclusively by race. It does require understanding how money moves.
Cooperation Is Harder Than Talking About It
There is another lesson from those twenty-one jitney drivers that deserves attention. Cooperation sounds wonderful until people actually have to cooperate. Somebody has to give up some individual control. Somebody’s route may have to change. Somebody has to trust the person keeping the books. Rules have to be created. Disagreements have to be settled. Individual egos have to coexist inside a collective structure. The Safe Bus founders were competitors before they became partners. That may be one of the most valuable details in the entire story. They did not cooperate because they had never competed. They cooperated because they eventually recognized that competing against one another was limiting what all of them could build.
Black Economic History Is Bigger Than We Are Taught
Stories like Safe Bus matter because too much Black history is reduced to suffering and protest. We absolutely need to understand slavery, segregation, lynching, disenfranchisement, and the civil rights movement. But Black history also includes balance sheets. It includes incorporation papers. It includes factories, insurance companies, banks, farms, newspapers, transportation systems, and commercial districts. Freedom has always had an economic dimension. The right to enter somebody else’s business matters. So does the ability to create your own. Political rights and economic capacity are not substitutes for one another. A strong community needs both.
The Larger Lesson
The lesson I take from Dr. Claud Anderson and the Safe Bus story is not that every Black person needs to open a business tomorrow. The deeper lesson is that ownership changes the position from which people negotiate. Owning property changes something. Owning businesses changes something. Owning intellectual property changes something. Controlling production and distribution changes something. Building institutions that can survive one person’s lifetime changes something. A paycheck can help a family survive this month. An institution can influence what opportunities exist for the next generation. That is the difference between simply participating in an economy and helping shape it.
Summary
The Safe Bus Company began in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, in 1926 when twenty-one Black jitney operators joined forces to provide organized transportation to underserved Black neighborhoods. The company grew into the largest Black-owned and operated transportation business of its kind in the world, employing more than eighty drivers and carrying roughly 8,000 passengers a day. Contrary to some viral accounts, reliable historical sources do not support the claim that Safe Bus operated more than five hundred buses. In 1968, the company expanded service across Winston-Salem, serving riders of all races. The city purchased its assets in 1972 and incorporated the operation into the Winston-Salem Transit Authority. Dr. Claud Anderson later developed PowerNomics, an economic framework emphasizing Black production, distribution, consumption, ownership, and collective economic power. Safe Bus provides a real historical example of what collective ownership could accomplish decades before PowerNomics had a name.
Conclusion
What stays with me is not merely that Black men owned some buses. It is that twenty-one men who had been competing against one another looked around and realized they could build something larger together. They pooled what they had, organized it, created jobs, served thousands of people, and eventually operated transportation across an entire American city. For decades, Black children in Winston-Salem could look out the window and see evidence that ownership was possible. That is a powerful kind of education. Dr. Claud Anderson has spent much of his life arguing that economic power requires more than earning money and spending money. It requires asking who owns the process in between. Safe Bus answered that question in real life. For a time, Black people did not merely ride the route. They owned the route.