Earl g graves sr bio

was born in Brooklyn, New York, on January 9, 1935, and grew up in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood. His father worked as a shipping clerk in New York's garment district. Bedford-Stuyvesant, far from the nightclubs and jazz of Harlem, was home to many similar working-class black families. Many owned their own homes, as Graves later pointed out in an interview with Los Angeles Times writer Lee Romney. "I swept the sidewalk once a day and God forbid if I didn't bring the garbage cans in after the garbage had been collected," he recalled. "From that environment came the idea of wanting to do something of my own… ." Still, entrepreneurship seemed an unlikely aven