The Andersons, an Illiniois family, made the statement of buying black for a year in what is called The Empowerment Experiment. This past January marked the completion of the experiment aimed at investing their money into Black-owned businesses. They note that African-Americans carry nearly $850 billion in spending power but that very little of that money circulates through those "underserved" communities. The Andersons estimated that they spent about 70 percent of their dollars, or slightly less than $70,000, with black-owned businesses in 2009.

This year, they are pushing the experiment into what Maggie Anderson called "movement mode." She will become the face of a national campaign to gain commitments from many African-Americans to support black-owned businesses and forward their spending records to researchers who will gauge the impact and extrapolate what it would mean on a larger scale.