31 Aug 2026 April Chapman: Black Americans Don’t Need Government-Run Grocery Stores. We Need Ownership.

“We should be teaching our children to own the grocery store—not training them to thank a politician for running it,” writes Project 21 Ambassador April Chapman as she reflects on New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s plan to open city-run grocery stores.

She also reveals how Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Congressional Black Caucus have done black Americans a great disservice by embracing socialist ideologies: “Government dependence does not become freedom simply because a celebrated black leader advocated it.”

Read April’s commentary in full below.

Black Americans should be alarmed whenever politicians sell government dependence as the pathway to freedom. For generations, too many of our most influential leaders have conditioned us to distrust private enterprise while looking to government to provide—and increasingly control—the essentials of daily life: healthcare, education, childcare, housing and now groceries.

April Chapman

Martin Luther King, Jr., belongs in this criticism, not outside it. His own writings attacked capitalism and embraced socialist economic thinking. This ideological legacy has helped condition black Americans to view government provision as liberation and private enterprise as exploitation. King’s prominence does not exempt his ideas from scrutiny, and I will not attach a ceremonial disclaimer of admiration before challenging them.

Government dependence does not become freedom simply because a celebrated black leader advocated it.

Today, the Congressional Black Caucus carries forward the same government-centered political vision. Its members should have to defend the spending programs, entitlements and expanded federal authority they champion. Calling those policies “equity,” “affordability” or “economic justice” does not place them beyond criticism. My objection is to the underlying premise: that black advancement requires government to assume an ever-larger role in our economic lives.

When our leaders repeatedly portray capitalism as the enemy, they discourage us from pursuing the very tools that build generational wealth: entrepreneurship, investment, property ownership and private enterprise. We are encouraged to measure progress by what politicians distribute instead of what families own, build, earn and pass down. That is a prescription for political dependence, not economic independence.

Mayor Mamdani’s municipal grocery-store proposal illustrates this mentality. Taxpayer-funded stores do not make food free to produce, transport or sell. Someone still pays. Who absorbs the losses if these stores fail? What happens to independent neighborhood grocers competing against a government that can subsidize its own operations with public money?

We should be teaching our children to own the grocery store—not training them to thank a politician for running it.

Black Americans have much to gain from government protecting our rights, enforcing contracts and keeping our neighborhoods safe. That does not mean we benefit from government becoming our landlord, employer, grocer and permanent provider. Assistance during hardship is one thing. Organizing a community’s future around government dependence is another.

The promise of equal economic outcomes is a lie and a trap. Politicians cannot guarantee everyone the same result, but they can use that promise to justify taking greater control over what we earn, own and keep.

Our ancestors were denied ownership of their labor and the freedom to build wealth for their families. That history should make us fiercely resistant to economic subjugation. I regard socialism’s substitution of state control for individual economic agency as bondage by another name. The absence of physical chains does not make dependence synonymous with freedom.

Black America needs more ownership, more enterprise and more economic freedom—not another generation taught to mistake government dependence for deliverance.

April Chapman is a Project 21 Ambassador with the National Center for Public Policy Research and host of the “Unshakable” Podcast.