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Black businesses once boomed in Berlin

(Feb. 19, 2015) Longtime Berlin resident Gregory Purnell believes now is the perfect time for a history lesson.
Last month the reigning “Coolest Small Town” began holding public meetings to map the future in broad strokes. Business was booming in the vibrant downtown, and good will was at an all-time high.
Then, a newspaper ran a story about a racist post on social media by a local high school student and other incidents, unrelated as they were, followed.
“People were saying ‘the media made this happen,’” Purnell said. “The media defined it as racial and all this, that and the other, but it’s also talking about the little seed that’s still there – that little ugliness that’s still amongst us. That’s why it (the newspaper report) was made a pariah when it came out.
“Then you get a fight,” Purnell continued. “Now the thoughts are back to the ’50s and ’60s, and every element of this is trying to suppress the racial element of this. Everybody is saying, ‘No, it wasn’t racial.’ Nobody wants that tag. And so Berlin, then, must rid itself of that tag. Berlin wants to clean up its image.”
In total, four incidents, which again were unrelated, nevertheless occurred during a bizarre five-day span that ended exactly a week before the beginning of Black History Month.
“This happening on the cusp is the perfect storm,” Purnell said. “Berlin has become a place that people in every state can say they might have been to. Berlin is growing. You’ve got a town that’s emerging to be the best that it can ever be. All this has to be connected to Berlin’s past.
“When people come, they’re not just coming to one side of Berlin,” Purnell continued. “That’s not what we have to promote. We have to promote Berlin as a complete community. And so, therefore, in order for people to be a part of that community, things have to be brought out.”
Turn of the century
Today, in Berlin, more than 20 percent of residents share African-American ancestry. Walking down Main Street, or shopping in businesses throughout the town, that fact might not be immediately apparent.
This wasn’t always the case.
“Entrepreneurs in the community goes all the way back to the Civil War,” Purnell said. “By 1865 you were freed and a large part of the African-American community went into the Sinepuxent area and to the Berlin area. Some had transports, some walked, but they all wanted to get as far away as they could from where they had been, and so these communities were established, and all these towns were settled by these folks.”
From the beginning, certain members of the African-American community excelled in business, and so they became businessmen and women.
“They went into business selling crops, selling products from hog kills, these types of things,” Purnell said. “That enabled the 1900s African-Americans to have some things established in the community, and businesses started to pick up from there.”
House restaurants became a popular endeavor, with residents selling platters and offering dining space in their living rooms. Charles Henry Sr. and Rachel and Elisha Smack set up shop on Flower Street, while Emma and George Coard, Lillie Parsons and “Mom” Lola and “Pop” Lester Rayne each operated home-based businesses on Branch Street.
The first African-American storefronts popped up in the 1920s and 1930s, with men like William “Pop Willie” Briddell, who owned a gas station and sold groceries, and James Purnell, who owned a dairy farm.  
Women, meanwhile, like Winifred Purnell and Catherine Lewis, opened beauty salons.
“In every African-American community there’s one thing that’s always going to be popular, and that’s the beauty salons,” Purnell said. “Winifred and Catherine had beauty salons right across the street from each other in Berlin, right off of Branch Street.”
Purnell said beauty salons worked while other businesses failed, “because there was a need for women to want to look good.”
“Looking good makes you feel better about yourself,” he said. “Men were the same way, and Mr. Riley Robbins was one of the beginning barbers that had a storefront, and that storefront was part of a restaurant, grocery store and kind of a beer hall building. It wasn’t a great big building, mind you, but it was a building that housed all of that.”
Charles Henry opened a grocery store on Flower Street. Others, such as Raymond White, Sheldon Dennis, Jack Dennis and John ‘Happy Jack’ Smack, opened taxi businesses in nearby Ocean City in the 1930s and 1940s.
Then, in the 1950s an old army barracks on Flower Street became a soda fountain and restaurant.
“The entire area was called ‘Soda Fountain,’” Purnell said. “There was a poolroom next to it and there was a little dance hall and a little church and a funeral parlor.
“You never had to deal with the racial element back then because everybody knew what their place was,” Purnell said. “Growing up in their confines, it was good because people needed to have gas, so the people in the community bought gas. But this was just the African-American community. It wasn’t all of Berlin.”
Integration
“After they built the highway, the only time you would see a white person in your community would be when the insurance man came by to collect every week,” Purnell said. “Every Monday or every other Monday, he would come to collect.”
Purnell said the integration into public schools was a major part of the sea change, but the integration of commerce also played a major role, albeit often one-sided.
“Berliners thought of Berlin as Berlin, not just their area, and so people started to build the town more, he said. “Everybody that had a few dollars started to go to town more. I could go uptown to buy gas, because it’s maybe three cents cheaper than I could from Pop Willie, who I’ve been buying it from for years.
“Then people stopped dealing with the hog-killing people, because they could buy meats at the store,” Purnell continued. “They just felt easier about it. Before [integration] you didn’t go into any of those stores, but it was a natural thing that just kind of happened.”
The downside of integration was that far more money flowed out of the black community than came back in.
“It started to wane in African-American businesses,” Purnell said. “When the clientele started to change, that caused the African-American business owner to lose his control over those dollars that were coming to him in his community. He is no longer feasible. He no longer has that business, so the business has to close.”
The businesses that did stay open were often self-contained, including beauty salons and barbershops.
“Most of that business was self-serving,” Purnell said. “It was only for that community. White people aren’t going to come to the black beauty salon, so those were still popular.”
Despite the slumping business, a few windows of opportunity were opening, and the importance of education was stressed more than ever in the African-American community.
“The thing they talked about in school was not to work in a chicken factory and not to drive in a truck,” Purnell said. “That was the thing. Your parents at home, every day, were telling you, ‘Get that education. Get your lessons because you don’t want to catch chicken.’
“To get a high school diploma at that time was a symbol that you were worthy of hire, that you could go into the army,” Purnell continued. “You could do all of these things. That diploma meant that you had accomplished something.”
College education, on the other hand, seemed like a far-off dream to a majority of people in the African-American community.
“College was a thing for people who had money,” Purnell said. “A few people in the black community sent their children to college, but it wasn’t what happened to the largest percentage of the class. If it’s 50 percent now it would have been five or 10 percent then.”
1970s and 1980s
Slow, gradual changed continued into the next several decades.
Jim Jarmon opened a trucking company and became one of the most successful businessmen in Berlin during the early 1970s.
The soda fountain remained open, and Howard “Pike” Bowen started a bus company.
“The beauty parlors and the barbershop suffered during that time, but still there was a enough that they could keep going,” Purnell said. “Rob Brittingham had the fish market and the fish market building is still there. He used to sell fish out of his truck in the ’50s and ’60s, then he bought that building and set up a fish market there. He went from his truck to a storefront business.”
Others, such as Charles Henry, sold real estate, leveraging property passed down by parents and grandparents to accumulate land holdings.
The taxi companies also continued to flourish.
“That is one that has always worked because the people in Berlin have always had fingers up,” Purnell said. “Joe Purnell used to drive a cab for the community, then after integration he really expanded, and others like Exvelt Smith had clienteles on both sides of the track even before integration.
“Those types of businesses continued to grow, but restaurants particularly started to lose out because you could go somewhere else and get food cheaper,” Purnell said. “People weren’t going out to eat once a week like they used to do, and there was no need to have a restaurant in the community because you could go to McDonald’s or to a fast food place.”
Economic conditions in the African-American community continued to lag behind their white neighbors.
“Even though we had business, people still didn’t have cars and the types of things that really make communities go,” Purnell said. “Mothers didn’t take their children to soccer practices and things of that sort because you were too busy working. Everybody was working.”
The 21st Century
“At the turn of this century there were so few African-American businesses that have been a carryover from that time, from 1900 to 2000,” Purnell said. “Every 10 or 20 years things changed, and those things from previous generations no longer existed.
“When we start in 2001, Jessie Turner is a cobbler right in Berlin,” Purnell said. “He worked for Joe’s Shoes, one of those ancient stores, and now he owns the store and owns the building. Glendola Bowen has a beauty shop. She had been trying all her life, and she was finally able to get a storefront, Finally Yours.”
Purnell said integration mixed the communities, but failed to change the economic situation significantly.
“We were able to get other jobs, but we weren’t all of the sudden becoming equal economically,” he said. “Socially we were supposed to be, but that didn’t have anything to do with economics.
“When we had a segregated black community African-Americans owned buses and had their own routes,” Purnell continued. “When it became integrated, they closed those schools, so they still drove buses, but now you’ve got 10 or 12 African-American drivers out of 60 or 70 when it used to be 20 out of 40.”
The corner store, an essential part of any community, has only once been owned by an African-American, Wallace Purnell.
Some in the community have flourished in Berlin, such as Patrick Henry, a noted artist who also works in real estate. Many others continue to flounder.
“Storefronts in Berlin have changed and the need for what is there is not Afrocentric,” he said. “If you have money, you can buy the business up here, but it’s not going to so much affect your community. African-American business has less effect on the community now than it did then.”
Today, Purnell estimated, less than one percent of businesses in Berlin are owned by African Americans.
“The African-American community must understand from whence it came,” Purnell said. “Somewhere there has become a disconnect in the community, where before there was so much pride and everything was so self-contained and everything was good. Even though we were in our own little bubble, there was unity, unity in culture, unity in business and unity in education.
That’s not to say that Purnell believes integration itself eroded that sense of pride, or that the two must be mutually exclusive.
“You have to remember that the melting pot is not a soup pot, it’s a salad pot,” he said. “Everything in it is supposed to be distinct and a part of that mix that makes up the bowl. It ought to be able to be identified in there. You’re not just boiling it down to make a soup and everything is one color. The greatest salads have the greatest ingredients.”
History, pride, a sense of self worth, Purnell believes, are the real keys to taking the next step in reaching toward true equality.
“I want my younger people today to know how strong the African-American community was at one time,” Purnell said. “I think we’re doing a disservice to ourselves when so many of our young people have completely gone astray. They don’t have pride, not in Berlin or even in themselves that we would have the east side of Berlin be a scourge on the town.
“What happened last month was an isolated situation in an otherwise progressive town,” Purnell continued. “Berlin’s east and west are mixing together politically, socially and with our families. Economics are the last part of that equation, and to reach that goal we’ve got to get our pride back. I want my community to know that, yes, we’re still proud of what we were, that it gives you a little bit of pride to say, ‘I am a Berliner.’”