A Room Of Our Own

August carries a different weight in this room. National Black Business Month arrives each year with hashtags and roundups and well meaning lists, and most brands borrow it for thirty one days the way they borrow any occasion on the calendar. The Embassy Cigar Lounge does not borrow it. This is a Black owned room, built in the Chicago Southland by people who own what they built, and when the month that honors Black owned business comes around, the honest thing to say is that we are not observing it from the outside. We are what it is about.

The month itself has a founding story worth knowing. In 2004, an engineer named Frederick E. Jordan Sr. and a historian named John William Templeton put National Black Business Month on the calendar, dedicating August to the millions of Black owned businesses operating across America and the policy conditions they grow in. Jordan came to the idea honestly. He had started his own engineering firm in San Francisco in 1969 and could not get a bank to back him, so he ran it part time out of his home until the work spoke louder than the lenders. He built it anyway, and the firm he built went on to complete more than a thousand projects. The month exists because he remembered exactly how that first year felt.

Our own founding story is younger and closer to home. The Embassy Cigar Lounge was co founded by Louis Morgan and Corey Singleton, and the ribbon was cut at 1615 Vollmer Road in Flossmoor on April 16, 2024. What they built is 6,400 square feet holding two rooms and one standard: a public lounge with a bar, a walk in humidor, a conference room, and a golf simulator, and a members lounge behind its own door with private rooms, member storage, and seating that was chosen for how long you will want to stay in it. There is a barber shop on site, because a room engineered for arrival should be able to send you back out sharper than you came in. None of that is a boast. It is a standard, and standards are the family trait this month celebrates.

So here is what August looks like in The Journal, in the newsletter, and across our feeds. History in the books, and the present tense in our chairs. Over the next four weeks we will tell the stories of the Black builders who made the world this room lives in: the bartender who wrote the book on American cocktails, the hotelier whose room settled a presidency, the distiller whose craft became Tennessee whiskey, and the hands that rolled the American cigar into being. Alongside them, we will sit with the builders among us, the members of this room who own businesses of their own, because the strongest argument for what this place is has always been the people in it.

Membership at The Embassy Cigar Lounge is a conversation, not a credential, and the path is short: Apply · Tour · Conversation · Welcome. During a month about ownership, it is worth saying plainly that this room keeps a table among owners and builders, and the chair does not care what you drove here.

The month is long, the chairs are deep, and the stories are good. Pull one up. August belongs to the builders, and in this room, it always has.