Taylor Electric Company stands as one of the oldest family-owned Black businesses in the United States and Chicago’s longest-running Black-owned enterprise. Its history is deeply woven into the fabric of Chicago, reflecting the city’s evolution and the perseverance of its founders.
Sam Taylor, the company’s founder, arrived in Chicago from Alabama’s coal mines during the Great Migration, armed with a sixth-grade education and possibly fleeing a warrant for avenging his brother’s death. In Chicago, he worked various jobs—stoking coal for a railroad, running a saloon, and sweeping floors at Cuneo Press—while learning electrical work alongside Black electrician Robert Patterson at the Pullman Company. He also took young Charles Stewart, son of his partner Annie Stewart, under his wing, treating him as a son and later an apprentice.
Spotting a correspondence course ad for electrician training, likely at Cuneo Press, Sam faced racial barriers when the provider refused to enroll a Black man. A Greek-American friend intervened, ordering the course under his name, which enabled Sam to earn his electrician’s license in 1922—possibly the first issued to an African American in Chicago.
At Taylor Electric Company, Sam and Charles installed doorbells and lights in Chicago’s Motor Row District for clients like Blue Star Auto and Al Capone, and worked for Greer College, where Sam successfully advocated for Charles’s admission. In the 1930s, Sam challenged “Umbrella Mike” Boyle and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) Local 134, which initially denied him membership. With the support of Congressman Oscar De Priest, Sam and Charles, alongside approximately fifty Black electricians, secured Charter 9362, forming the first Black electrical union. Boyle eventually collaborated, employing Charter 9362 members on South Side projects.
In 1941, A. Philip Randolph’s advocacy led to President Franklin Roosevelt’s Executive Order 8802, mandating nondiscrimination in defense industries. By 1943, Sam, Charles, and other Charter 9362 members joined the previously all-white Local 134. Despite urban renewal policies displacing many Black businesses in the late 1940s, Taylor Electric relocated and thrived, becoming a rare union shop as other Black electricians faced exclusion.
In the 1950s, Sam’s son Rufus returned from the Korean War, learning the trade from the ground up. By 1969, Rufus and his sister Jessie Taylor Dinkins took over, with Jessie managing the office. Sam passed away in 1973 in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Rufus pivoted the company toward large-scale construction contracts, leveraging affirmative action policies and co-founding Black Contractors United in 1979. A friend of Mayor Harold Washington, Rufus navigated Chicago’s political landscape, securing projects like the Sears Tower, McCormick Place expansion, and O’Hare’s People Mover. By the early 1990s, Taylor Electric maintained electrical systems at Comiskey Park (now Guaranteed Rate Field) and Soldier Field.
Tragedy struck in 1995 when Rufus was killed in a carjacking. With the company’s future uncertain, Kenny Dinkins, Sam’s grandson and vice president, convinced the board to appoint Rufus’s daughter, Martha Taylor, as president. At 33, with no electrical experience and in a male-dominated industry, Martha led Taylor Electric through Chicago’s residential building boom, growing the company from $4 million to $12 million in annual revenue by her 2015 retirement.
Today, Rufus’s daughters, Kendra Dinkins (president and CEO) and Karen Michele Dinkins (executive vice president and COO), lead Taylor Electric. Kendra, a 2022 Electric Association Hall of Fame inductee and former president of the Federation of Women Contractors, continues the family’s legacy. With approximately 100 employees and $15 million in annual revenue by 2017—far surpassing the $1.06 million average for Black-owned businesses over 16 years old, per the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2020 data—Taylor Electric remains a testament to the Taylor family’s resilience, adaptability, and unity, thriving as a century-old institution.