Some 30 years ago, few knew Kansas City’s Black business community better than Larry Jackson Jr.
The lifelong city resident and bootstrap entrepreneur was a “walking Rolodex” of the day’s places and faces, his son, Scott Mason, 53, said. “If you needed X, Y or Z, he could usually rattle off a couple names.”
Jackson could tell you where to go to get a haircut, a fine meal, a bag of groceries — anything — from a Black person.
He understood, too, what it meant to run one of these storefronts. In the 1980s, he and a friend opened JAM Distributors, a wholesale beauty supply shop on Minnesota Avenue in Kansas City, Kansas, that, according to a newspaper clipping saved by the family, kept the “contemporary Black woman and her needs in mind” with brands like Ultra Sheen, Posner’s Lusters and Lustrasilk. The name represented the combination of his last name with that of his co-owner, Lloyd Mason Jr.
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