In the city of Boston, Massachusetts the Decade of the nineteen seventies gave birth to many African-American oriented community organizations. The foremost of these was the Black United Front and it's financial arm, the Black United Fund.
These programs were in operation to help uplift a people in areas that had been neglected for too many years, the inner city urban ghetto.
The aforementioned neglect effected every area of the daily life of the African-American Family. As a matter of fact the assault on the African-American Family can be traced to that era. The result of that aggressive movement to tear apart the fabric of a people was poorer education and the tools needed to help generations gain and hold employment, let alone create employment.
At the same time that this was happening another organization became a reality when the Afrikan Heritage Institute opened its doors in 1974. Conceived first as an information gathering group dedicated to the History of Africans in Africa and throughout the Diaspora, it grew into a multifaceted organization that served the community with radio and lectures and finally stores that filled an area that had been left unfilled: the book store. Combined Black Publications at first supplied many of the colleges and universities in the Boston metropolitan area with libraries of African and African-American books via the Black Student Unions. From Harvard to Salem State; Boston College to MIT, Combined Black Publications, Distributors was there.