By Adam Langer
“When you think about what the issue was and why it needed to be confronted head-on,” said Saffold, “it was an opportunity for some people who would generally be fragmented to see how the police could turn from being a public protector to being a brutal individual.”
Lillard says he knew he had what it took to be an entrepreneur from the time he finished kindergarten. The world is divided between those who create work and those who have work created for them, he says, and as a boy of six growing up in Memphis, Tennessee, he knew which he was going to be.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
“I remember my grandmother created a job for herself, like many other blacks did at the time,” Lillard says. “She would go downtown in Memphis and get on a bus or a truck headed for Arkansas or Mississippi and work the fields. She was a day laborer. I went along with her, and I saw a void. I said, ‘Look at these people working. Here’s a guy working for a dollar picking cotton, and he has to put his bag down and walk for a block to get water.’ So I asked permission to bring my wagon and two buckets of water, and I pulled it down through the fields. I sold water for whatever they would give me–a nickel or a dime. And at the end of the workday I would have nine to ten dollars, and the fastest cotton picker would only have made about three dollars. All the workers would look at me and laugh.
A year later he tried to start his own agency but was ignored. He says he was laughed out of an A & P when he proposed a security plan. “They called the other people out to look at this brazen little black kid coming in with the nerve to try and take away business from Pinkerton’s. I knew I wasn’t going to get anywhere. I had to be somebody.”
Lillard went back to A & P with a security plan for all of its stores, and this time he wasn’t laughed at. But the managers offered him only the opportunity to take over security for the stores that were being handled by the community’s one other black detective agency. He wouldn’t take it. “I said, ‘Wait a minute. A & P has 55 stores in the community that have security guards. You have five detective agencies working with you to cover those stores. Why would you offer me the ten stores of this old black guy who’s an old retired police commander and doesn’t have anything else going for him? Why would you want to take away his stores and not the other guys’?’ They said, ‘Well, he’s our minority.’ I said, ‘He’s there to appease the black community. I’m here to solve a security problem. I’m not here to appease the black community. I have a detective agency to do security. And that’s what I’m here to do.’
Lillard says that at its peak, in the 70s, his agency was a multimillion-dollar corporation with 750 employees and contracts with chains such as Zayre, Walgreens, and Kentucky Fried Chicken. But then businesses started leaving the city’s black neighborhoods, and Lillard began looking for other sources of income, though he kept the agency, now known as International Detectives and Investigators. He produced and hosted a TV variety show on Channel 26 called Stars of Tomorrow, which introduced young entertainers like Natalie Cole and Deniece Williams to the city. He invested in a construction company. He ran a couple of movie theaters that showed second-run films. Eventually he started writing a column for the Nation of Islam’s newspaper, the Final Call.
