Emory alum Maggie Anderson and her family gained international attention in 2009 as they lived out her public pledge to only “buy Black” for an entire year. Anderson shared her passion fueled by their historic year — known as “The Empowerment Experiment” — as the keynote speaker for the university’s 2021 Martin Luther King Jr. Lecture.
Anderson graduated from Emory College of Arts and Sciences in 1993 with a major in political science, and went on to earn a JD and an MBA from the University of Chicago. She is the author of “Our Black Year: One Family’s Quest to Buy Black in America’s Racially Divided Economy.”