When the world was busy quarantining on June 14th and was into the streets to raise their voice for ‘Black Lives Matter’ Byron Allen has shared his thoughts in his own fashion which actually depicts from the start. The stand-up comedian and now turned media tycoon were said to spend a worth of $1 million to get 2 pages in 8 prominent newspapers which included ‘The New York Times,’ ‘Los Angeles Times’, and ‘The Washington Post,’ to operate ‘Black America Speaks. America Should Listen.”
“I knew white media wasn’t going to publish it,” Allen, 59, asserts of the essay, which traces childhood memories of the National Guard invading his Detroit neighborhood after unrest following Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, then lays out a nine-step plan to eradicate racial inequality, including education reform and reparations. “Because that’s talking about how you really fix it. White America doesn’t want to fix this. White America is not interested in giving up any of their pie.”
Allen might be aware as he is one of the handfuls of Afro-American to have a prominent media firm and his Entertainment Studios is said to produce almost 60 popular television shows and having “The Weather Channel and seven more 24-hour cable networks; acquiring and distributing features like 47 Meters Down and Hostiles.”
“African Americans don’t have access to capital,” Allen says. “It’s amazing that for the first 15 to 20 years of my company, I couldn’t get a single bank loan.” It was that early resistance, however, that fired his ambitions, turning what started in 1993 as a one-man operation in his dining room (his mom fielded calls as his “executive assistant”) into a muscular media company that Allen values in the low-10 figures. “If someone offered me $5 billion for the company,” he says, “I would not accept it.”
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