Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich has a long-standing reputation for making offensive comments regarding race & ethnicity.  According to an artice from ThinkProgress that was seeded on here by my good friend McSpocky, Gingrich wrote this in a draft of a 1993 speech:

"For poor minorities, entrepreneurship in small business is the key to future wealth.  This is understood thoroughly by most of the Asians, partially by Latinos, and to a tragically small degree by most of the American black community."

Really? Most black Americans do not understand business ownership as the key to future wealth?

Gingrich has said many times that he is a historian.  With the comments he made almost two decades ago and the recent derogatory remarks regarding President Obama as the "food stamps President" and

“Really poor children, in really poor neighborhoods have no habits of working and have nobody around them who works so they have no habit of showing up on Monday,” Gingrich claimed.

Let's take a walk through history, shall we? 

Madam C.J. Walker - business owner; manufactured and sold hair grooming products at the turn of the 20th century.

A.G. Gaston - business owner, early 20th century.  Owned S&L bank, business college, construction company, motels, real estate, burial insurance company, two cemeteries, and two radio stations.  Here is the site for A.G. Gaston Enterprises.

Here is history about the 1921 Tulsa race riots, in which black owned businesses were targeted.

 Ebony Magazine: Here is the history of the couple who started not only that magazine, but Jet Magazine, Fashion Fair Cosmetics, the Ebony Fashion Fair, and multiple enterprises, John H. Johnson and his wife Eunice Walker Johnson.

I cannot talk about Black Americans in business without mentioning another well-known magazine, Black Enterprise.  This magazine focuses not only on Black-owned businesses, but on careers, technology, and many other subjects.  Here is a bio on the founder of the magazine, Earl G. Graves, Sr.  

This was but a brief stroll.  There will be more history coming.  This article scratches the surface of proving that Newt Gingrich is wrong when it comes to his beliefs and statements about Black Americans and business.  For a man who claims to be an expert in history, he is woefully ignorant.