Ernest Lee Black

Ernest Lee Black was born February 20, 1945, in Memphis, Shelby County, Tennessee, to Lois Sylvester Jones Black. He was raised by his mother and by William Thomas Black, and was the oldest of eight children.

He was preceded in death by his mother, Lois Sylvester Jones Black; William Thomas Black; his granddaughter, Brittany; and five siblings: Cora Beard, Charles Black, Bobby Black, Melvin Black, and William Black.

He leaves behind his lifelong partner, Earnestine Black, of Grandview, Missouri; sons, Earlon King Black of Grandview, Missouri, Ernest Elton Black of Kansas City, Missouri, and Eric Christopher and Tawanna Black of Eden Prairie, Minnesota; daughter, Evangeline Denise Black of Blue Springs, Missouri; fifteen grandchildren, Candace, Cyvon, Earlesha, Destiny, Katea, Emanuel, Emoni, Elecia, Ernest Jr., Amos, Brianna, Preston, Eric Jr., Traviata, and Christian; great-grandchildren; siblings, Barbara Ann Black, Joseph Black, both of Memphis, Tennessee; beloved cousin, Deloris Jean Pointer of Memphis; devoted friend and brother, Eddie Ecoles, and Eddie’s wife, Bobby, of Memphis; and a host of nieces, nephews, other relatives, and friends.

To his family, and to everyone who knew him in Memphis, he was Sonny. To the men he worked beside on the plant floors of Kansas City for more than forty years, he was Ernie.

Ernest attended Alonzo Locke Elementary School and Hamilton High School in South Memphis. His future wife, Earnestine Barnes, had walked the same halls years earlier, and Ernest liked to point out the difference between them: “She went to it. I went through it.”

From the age of ten, Ernest knew the work of a sharecropper’s son, on farmland in West Memphis, Arkansas, near the ground where Southland Casino stands today. He learned early that a man could work as hard as anyone alive and still not own the land beneath his feet. He never forgot it.

In September 1963, at eighteen, Ernest left Memphis for Apopka, Florida. He traveled some seventy miles a day to Cape Canaveral, where he worked on the construction crews that built the launch platforms, in the years this country was reaching for the moon.

He returned home to Memphis in 1966 and worked at the Armour packing plant, and it was there that he met Earnestine Barnes.

When Ernest and Earnestine married, he embraced not only her but her three children, Earlon, Evangeline, and Elton, whom he adopted and raised as his own. In 1974, their son Eric was born. When the Memphis plant began to wind down, Armour offered Ernest a transfer to either Minneapolis or Kansas City. They chose Missouri, and the family settled in Grandview, in the home that held them for the next four decades.

Ernest stayed with Armour until the Kansas City plant closed in 1983, then went to work for Continental Baking Company on Troost Avenue in downtown Kansas City, in repairs and maintenance. The plant made Wonder Bread and Hostess snacks, and there was rarely a day when a Twinkie, a cupcake, or a Hostess pie was not sitting on his counter for whoever came by. When the Troost plant closed in 1997 and production moved to Lenexa, Kansas, Ernest moved with it. He retired in August 2008, after twenty-five years.

But the value of Ernest Black’s life cannot be measured by the number of years he worked, it must be measured by the way he used those years to make life better for so many others. Beginning in the early 1990s, he began buying real estate, and at the height of his real estate career, he owned eight rental properties including six duplexes, a single-family home, and the old family home back in Memphis. He taught himself the market, and he could have taught an investing class in any school in the city. The boy who once worked land his family did not own became a man who understood exactly what ownership was worth, and he spent it on the generation behind him, investing in education and transportation for his grandchildren so that they would begin further ahead than he had.

In 2013 he bought himself something for the pure joy of it: a Corvette C6 Grand Sport, 50th Anniversary Edition. That purchase brought him into Corvette Connected – Kansas City, and into another brotherhood — meetings, road trips, car shows, and a trophy or two. The trip he loved best was the one that carried the club to Memphis, where he showed his friends the city that made him and introduced them to Eddie Echols.

Family was the thread that ran through all of it. Ernest and Earnestine’s marriage changed, but their commitment did not. They continued to share the Grandview home and to raise their family together, and what began as a decision made for their children became a companionship that lasted the rest of his life.

On the morning of Friday, September 4, 2026, Ernest Lee Black departed this life at Research Medical Center in Kansas City, Missouri, at the age of 81.

Visitation — Thursday, September 17, 2026, 6:00 to 8:00 p.m.

Funeral Service — Friday, September 18, 2026, 11:00 a.m., at Mt. Moriah, Newcomer & Freeman Funeral Home, with burial and repast immediately following.

Mt. Moriah Cemetery South, 10507 Holmes Road, Kansas City, Missouri 64131

Officiating: Bishop David E. Johnson, Grace Apostolic Church, Minnesota