Four Black Entrepreneurs You Need to Know Before They Take Over the Room
By Charles Zackary King | America in Black and White | Season 4, Episode 135
WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 26, 2026
Left to right — Evan Campbell, Wendell Holton, Leonard King, and Frederick Anthony “Tony” Magby. Together, they are “Black Men United.”
THE HOOK
There is a lie that has been told so many times, in so many rooms, by so many mouths, that it has almost calcified into truth: that Black men don’t support each other. That they compete instead of collaborate. That the scarcity mindset runs so deep that there is no room at the table for a brother pulling up a chair. It is a lie and tonight, on a single episode of America in Black and White, four men are going to blow it apart, chapter by chapter, story by story, dollar by dollar.
When four Black entrepreneurs sit at the same table, something shifts in the atmosphere. Not because of the industries they represent, though those are remarkable. Not because of the credentials they carry, though those are earned. But because of what it means when men who could be running in isolation choose instead to run together. They choose to be honest about the road. They choose to name the obstacles, share the blueprints, and refuse to let the next generation figure it out alone. That is what Black Men United looks like in practice. Not a slogan. An action.
America in Black and White, the podcast and digital media platform hosted by Charles Zackary King, has never shied away from the conversations that matter most, the ones about legacy, community, economic power, and what it truly costs to build something from the ground up in this country. And on Wednesday, August 26, 2026, at 6:00 PM EST, Season 4, Episode 135 brings together four builders whose stories will make you rethink everything you thought you knew about what Black entrepreneurship looks like today.
Tonight’s table is not just carrying resumés. It is carrying decades of sacrifice, quiet mornings before the rest of the world woke up, decisions made in the dark before the outcome was visible. It is carrying strategies you can use, wisdom you have been waiting for, and a spirit that this culture desperately needs right now. Pull up. This one is for all of us.
WHY THIS EPISODE MATTERS
For too long, the full complexity of Black men, as thinkers, as builders, as fathers, as mentors, as visionaries, as entrepreneurs, has been compressed into a single story. This episode refuses that compression. What you will witness in Season 4, Episode 135 is Black men in their full humanity: honest about their failures, clear-eyed about their missions, and deeply, deliberately committed to something larger than themselves. This is not a performance. This is a reckoning with what it means to build and to build well.
The philosophical spine of this episode is rooted in a Desmond Tutu Black History Reflection and the Ubuntu principle, I am because we are. Ubuntu is not a sentiment. It is an architecture. It says that a person’s humanity is inextricably bound to the humanity of those around them. That no one rises alone. That the brother who succeeds strengthens the ground beneath every other brother still climbing. The themes that anchor this episode, Unity, Community Building, Brotherhood, Legacy, and Entrepreneurship, flow directly from that root. This is not just a podcast. It is a movement taking shape in real time, one honest conversation at a time.
And at the center of that movement tonight are four men who have each built something worth talking about. Something worth studying. Something worth protecting. Allow us to introduce them properly, because they deserve more than a bio. They deserve a story.
MEET THE MEN AT THE TABLE
| Evan Campbell-E&V Auto |
Evan Campbell, Founder of E&V Auto
Before Evan Campbell ever picked up a wrench, he watched his mother hold a world together with quiet, unbreakable hands. She did not speak in grand declarations. She demonstrated. She showed up. And in that showing up, she handed her son something no classroom could give him: the understanding that resilience is not a feeling, it is a practice. It is the discipline of choosing, every single day, to keep going even when the outcome is uncertain. Evan carried that lesson into every garage, every engine, every negotiation. It became the foundation of everything he would build.
But Evan was also a student of history and history radicalized his ambition. He found Malcolm X not as a distant figure but as a living instruction: know yourself, own your space, refuse to build someone else’s empire at the expense of your own. He found Alonzo Herndon, Atlanta’s first Black millionaire, who walked out of enslavement with eleven dollars and proceeded to build an insurance empire that served an entire people. Herndon did not wait for permission. He did not wait for favorable conditions. He identified a need in his community and became the answer. Evan saw that blueprint and recognized it immediately, because he had already started drawing his own version of it.
The automotive industry, Evan understood early, is not merely a trade. It is territory. And Black men needed to own it. E&V Auto is not just a business, it is a declaration of economic sovereignty built through skilled craftsmanship and the refusal to let technical excellence remain someone else’s domain. When you hand a wrench to a man who understands what ownership means, you are not watching someone fix a car. You are watching someone write his own future, one honest repair at a time.
Evan’s belief is simple and profound: the tools you master are the tools that free you. In a country that has historically tried to control the economic mobility of Black men by limiting their access to skilled trades, mastery becomes more than competence, it becomes resistance. Evan Campbell is building a legacy one engine at a time, and he is just getting started.
| “The wrench in my hand is the same as a pen in someone else’s. It’s how I write my future.” |
| ▶ What to Watch For Evan’s answer to the question of what Malcolm X taught him about entrepreneurship will stop you mid-scroll. |
| Wendell Holton- Holton Aerial Services, LLC |
Wendell Holton, Founder of Holton Aerial Services, LLC — DeSoto, Texas
Wendell Holton was raised on two gifts that don’t always arrive in the same household: presence and precision. His father showed him what it looks like to be a Black man who shows up, fully, consistently, without apology. His mother taught him that dreaming is not enough; you must dream with exactness, with intention, with a plan behind the vision. Together, they gave him a rare combination, the emotional grounding to stay rooted and the intellectual architecture to soar. Wendell did not squander either gift.
His intellectual hero is George Washington Carver, the Tuskegee genius who took a peanut and turned it into more than 300 products, who refused to patent most of his discoveries because he believed that knowledge should serve the people before it serves the marketplace. Carver saw possibility where others saw scarcity, and he gave that possibility away because his mission was never personal enrichment, it was collective liberation. Wendell carries that ethos into every flight he launches. When he puts a drone in the air, he is not just performing a service. He is widening the aperture of what Black-owned technology companies look like.
Holton Aerial Services, LLC, based in DeSoto, Texas, operates in a frontier where Black ownership is still rare enough to be remarkable. Drone and aerial technology is reshaping industries from agriculture to construction to public safety and most of the people doing that reshaping don’t look like Wendell Holton. He is changing that, quietly and completely, one flight at a time. His ability to see from above, literally and metaphorically, is what makes him one of the most compelling entrepreneurs of his generation.
There is something Wendell sees from altitude that the rest of us miss when we are locked into street-level hustle. He sees the missed connections between communities that could be collaborating. He sees the opportunities that look invisible from below because the angle is wrong. He sees the landscape of Black entrepreneurship the way a cartographer sees new territory, not as it is, but as it could be. What Wendell Holton is building is not just a company. It is a new vantage point.
| “When you fly above it, you see what the ground-level hustle sometimes can’t, the bigger picture, the missed opportunities, the possibilities hiding in plain sight.” |
| ▶ What to Watch For Wendell’s challenge to the community about what he sees from above that others at street level are missing. |
| Leonard King, Powerhouse Real Estate Consulting | Author | Titan Book Club |
Leonard King — Real Estate Advisor, Author, Brotherhood Builder
In brotherhood circles, they call him Leo King. And the name carries weight. Leonard King arrived at real estate the long way, through barbershop floors, through the particular kind of education you only get when you are standing close enough to community to feel its pulse. As a licensed barber educator, he understood something that most professionals take years to learn: that the most important real estate is not a property on a listing sheet. It is the trust you build inside a conversation. That uncommon combination of street-level wisdom and scholarly discipline became the signature of everything he does.
Today, Leonard is the founder of Powerhouse Real Estate Consulting (Power-House Consulting Group, LLC), holding advanced REALTOR® designations including ABR, SRS, RENE, and C2EX, credentials that represent years of disciplined study and a commitment to professional excellence that does not stop at good enough. But Leonard did not stop at professional excellence either. He turned it into a mission. He looked at the men around him, brilliant, capable, hungry and decided that what they needed was not just opportunity. They needed design. They needed a framework. And so he built one.
Manhood by Design is both a book and a workbook structured around eight pillars: Vision, Values, Identity, Systems, Habits, Discipline, Goals, and Legacy. It is not a self-help book in the conventional sense. It is a blueprint. It operates from the conviction that most men are not failing because they are not trying, they are drifting because they have never been given an architectural plan for who they are supposed to become. Leonard gives them one. And then he holds them to it. The Titan Book Club, the brotherhood ecosystem he created, is where men come in carrying books and leave carrying each other, accountable, challenged, and transformed.
His intellectual lineage is deliberate and powerful: Barack Obama, for demonstrating what grace under pressure looks like when the entire world is watching; Malcolm X, for the unapologetic architecture of self-determination and the courage to rebuild your identity from the inside out; and John Merrick, co-founder of North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance, the institution that proved that Black economic infrastructure is not a luxury. It is survival. Leonard King has absorbed all three and synthesized them into something entirely his own. He is not just serving his clients. He is designing a civilization, one man at a time.
| “Most men have goals. Very few have a design. And the difference between the two is the difference between drifting and building.” |
| ▶ What to Watch For Leonard’s breakdown of the eight pillars of Manhood by Design and the one pillar he says most men skip entirely. |
Learn more about Leonard King’s work at www.leomking.com
| Frederick Anthony “Tony” Magby, Rent The Occasion |
Frederick Anthony “Tony” Magby, Owner of Rent The Occasion
His full name is Frederick Anthony Magby. His circle calls him Tony. And Tony Magby has lived one of the most quietly extraordinary professional journeys you will encounter in this episode. A Tennessee State University graduate with a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science, a certified Project Management Professional (PMP), and an Agile Certified Practitioner (ACP), Tony spent years at the forefront of the corporate technology world, managing offshore teams at Motorola and Cisco Systems, delivering quality software to 1.5 million customer devices, operating at the highest levels of precision and accountability that elite corporate environments demand. By every conventional measure, he had made it.
And then, in October 2016, he made a different kind of move. He left the corporate structure he had mastered and poured every ounce of that precision into something that belonged entirely to him: Rent The Occasion, a Georgia-based event logistics and services company built on quality commitments, strategic alliances, and a client-first ethos that reflects the same standard of excellence Tony brought to every offshore delivery and every software milestone. He did not abandon his corporate training. He weaponized it. Every project management framework, every quality assurance discipline, every stakeholder communication principle that he refined over a career at two of the world’s most recognized technology companies now lives inside the operational DNA of Rent The Occasion.
Tony’s intellectual heroes reflect a man who thinks in both structure and spirit. H.J. Russell, the Atlanta builder who constructed airports and stadiums and broke racial barriers in the construction industry, showed Tony that Black men can and must take up space in the infrastructure of cities and communities. Dennis Kimbro, bestselling author of Think and Grow Rich: A Black Choice, gave Tony the conviction that mindset is the first infrastructure, that before you can build a company, you must build the architecture of belief inside yourself. Tony took both lessons seriously.
What Tony Magby proves, brilliantly, unapologetically, is that a corporate career is not a cage. It is a classroom. The discipline it demands, the systems it teaches, the failures it forces you to absorb and correct, all of it becomes capital when you finally decide to build your own. Tony graduated from that classroom on his own terms, and now he is building something that carries his name, reflects his standards, and opens doors for the next generation of Black entrepreneurs who wonder whether they have to choose between professional excellence and sovereign ownership. Tony Magby is living proof that the answer is no.
| “I didn’t leave corporate America. I took everything it taught me and built something that belongs to me.” |
| ▶ What to Watch For Tony’s answer when the host asks him what the biggest gap is between corporate skill and entrepreneurial survival and nobody warned him about it. |
Learn more about Rent The Occasion at www.RentTheOccasion.com
WHAT THEY HAVE IN COMMON
Four men. Four industries. Automotive craftsmanship. Drone and aerial technology. Real estate consulting and personal development. Event logistics and services. On the surface, you would be hard-pressed to find a more diverse range of professional callings. And yet, the moment these men sit at the same table, the commonalities reveal themselves with striking clarity. They all believe, not as an abstract philosophy but as a lived conviction, that Black men build best when they build together. That the act of sharing knowledge is not a threat to your own advancement. It is the very engine of it.
They share something else, too: a reverence for the men who came before them. Herndon, who built an empire from eleven dollars. Carver, who gave his genius to the people. H.J. Russell, who constructed the physical landscape of a city. Malcolm X, who rebuilt himself and then devoted that rebuilt self to a people. John Merrick, who understood that economic institutions are not optional for a community that wants to survive. Dennis Kimbro, who translated the language of wealth-building into a vocabulary that Black America could claim as its own. None of these men built in isolation. All of them understood that legacy is not a destination you arrive at, it is a discipline you practice every single day.
What Evan, Wendell, Leonard, and Tony also understand, perhaps more acutely than most, is that the next generation of Black entrepreneurs is watching. Not metaphorically. Literally. There are young men right now, in garages, in dorm rooms, in barbershops, in corporate cubicles they are already planning to leave, who are watching what these four men do in this moment and deciding what is possible for their own lives. That is the weight these four carry to the table tonight. And that is why this episode is not something to passively consume. It is something to absorb, discuss, share, and act on.
WHAT TO EXPECT WHEN YOU TUNE IN
This is not a highlight reel. This is the real thing. Here is a taste of what Season 4, Episode 135 delivers:
- Raw, honest conversation about the real cost of entrepreneurship — the sacrifices, the self-doubt, the 3 AM decisions that no one sees but everybody benefits from.
- Brotherhood accountability in practice — not as a hashtag or a catchphrase, but as a demonstrated way of being that these four men model in real time, in front of you.
- A Black history reflection that will give you chills — the Desmond Tutu Ubuntu reflection that anchors the entire conversation in something deeper than business strategy.
- Business wisdom from four industries you can apply immediately — whether you are starting out, scaling up, or rethinking your entire approach, there is something in this episode that is meant for you.
- A full breakdown of the eight pillars of Manhood by Design — and an honest look at the one pillar Leonard says most men skip entirely, often to their own detriment.
- The Titan Book Club and why every Black man needs a brotherhood ecosystem — a conversation about what it means to gather around literature and leave as leaders, and why that kind of formation is no longer optional.
- A dialogue between these four men that you will not see anywhere else — unscripted, unfiltered, and driven by genuine respect and shared conviction.
- Questions submitted from the community — including one that nobody in that room saw coming — and the answer that will have you replaying the clip for days.
If you have ever needed proof that Black men can sit at a table together and pour out everything they know for the benefit of everyone around them, tune in. If you have ever been told that ambition and brotherhood are mutually exclusive, tune in. If you are building something right now and you need to hear from men who are in it with you, who understand the terrain, who have made the sacrifices and are willing to talk about it, then Wednesday, August 26, 2026 at 6:00 PM EST is a non-negotiable appointment. Set the reminder. Call your people. And then share this episode like it belongs to everyone, because it does.
SHOW DETAILS
| ▼ Episode Information Show: America in Black and White Season & Episode: Season 4, Episode 135 Episode Title: “Black Men United” Host: Charles Zackary King Air Date: Wednesday, August 26, 2026 Time: 6:00 PM Eastern Standard Time https://www.youtube.com/live/VtZ9jb1lO_s?si=RkotPyiiVHYUjMMH Click the link above or below to watch the show live August 26th at 6pm EST “Don’t just watch it. Share it. Tag a brother who needs to see this.” |
THE SEND-OFF
Building in America as a Black man has never been a casual endeavor. It has required a particular kind of faith, not blind faith, but the faith that says: I see what this country has done, I know what it has withheld, I understand the weight of what I am carrying, and I am building anyway. That faith is not naïve. It is the most courageous thing a person can do. And the four men sitting at this table tonight, Evan, Wendell, Leonard, and Tony, deserve to be honored for it. Not because they have arrived. But because they showed up. Because they were honest. Because they chose to build in public, to share what they know, to make the path a little more visible for whoever comes next.
Ubuntu tells us: I am because we are. It tells us that no elevation is truly personal. That when one of us rises with integrity and takes the time to reach back, the entire community rises with them. These four men embody that truth. They did not come to this table to compete. They came to connect, to contribute, to carry the legacy forward in a way that makes the ancestors proud and gives the next generation a foundation to stand on. Tonight, America in Black and White is more than a podcast. It is a living demonstration of what happens when Black men choose each other, deliberately, publicly, and with everything they have.
Because when Black men rise together, they don’t just change their own story, they rewrite the one that was written for them.
| About the Show America in Black and White is a podcast and digital media platform hosted by Charles Zackary King that explores the Black experience in America through candid, culturally grounded conversations with entrepreneurs, community leaders, educators, and change-makers. New episodes drop weekly. Website: americainblackandwhite.us YouTube: @americainblackandwhite8299 Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100069304193527 IG: @americainblackandwhite X: @CharlesZackary4 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/c-z-king-889218209/ |