By John Lyon
Arkansas News Bureau
LITTLE ROCK — The federal stimulus is not helping blacks in Arkansas, a state NAACP official said Friday.
Dale Charles, president of the NAACP’s Arkansas branch, said stimulus dollars going to the private sector are bypassing the black community.
“The way stimulus money now is allocated, it will not benefit African Americans at all directly in this state. … All the money is currently being channeled down the same old way that money’s always been allocated, and that locks out black people,” Charles said in an interview with the Arkansas News Bureau.
Charles said few businesses in the state are black-owned — 4 percent according to U.S. Census Bureau data from 2002, the most recent available — and blacks who would like to start their own business cannot look to the stimulus for help.
“If you are not already in business, you don’t even qualify to make an application,” he said.
The state NAACP has formed a committee to study the issue, and the committee likely will ask Gov. Mike Beebe to make changes in the allocation process, Charles said.
Beebe spokesman Matt DeCample said the governor may not be able to make the changes Charles wants.
“The grants that we’re able to issue through the stimulus, that we have any input on, still have to fall into some specific guidelines put out by the federal government,” DeCample said.
But he said new businesses can get some stimulus money, indirectly.
“While there is not a grant program to help start up new businesses, there is money going to existing programs to help stimulate more new business, especially through the SBA (Small Business Administration),” he said.
Odies Wilson of Little Rock, a member of the board of the Arkansas-Mississippi Minority Supplier Development Council, said helping new businesses get started is not the focus of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.
“Most of the stimulus money is targeted toward existing businesses, because it’s trying to salvage those businesses that are already in business, to keep layoffs from occurring and those kinds of things,” said Wilson, chief lobbyist for the city of Little Rock.
Wilson said the council and several other organizations are working to get the word out to minority business owners in Arkansas who may qualify for stimulus money.
“If you throw a blanket across how diverse the existing business mix is, then you can make all kinds of generalizations about who is going to profit from and not profit from them,” Wilson said. “But that is just something that is built in with or without the stimulus money.”
He continued, “We’re always on the side of, the glass is half full, optimistically looking at how can we be part of the dynamic to get as many people as possible involved and aware.”
