Palmetto rose seller is a budding entrepreneur

Damian Brown was in the second grade when he joined up with other young boys who earned money by fashioning rose-shaped decorations from palmetto fronds and hawking them to tourists on the streets of Charleston.

Now, at 14, Brown has been named among a dozen international winners of the National Foundation for Teaching Entrepreneurship's Student of the Year competition. And, he's the youngest of the bunch.

The eighth-grader from the East Side will be going to New York with his mother, Almeta Brown, to rub shoulders with investment bankers and meet award winners from other states and nations including India and China.

The palmetto rose sellers were not always so well-regarded. These days, the city calls them artisans. When Brown got into the business, when he was 8 or 9 years old, some downtown merchants considered the rose peddlers little more than beggars.

Merchants often complained to the city about the kids aggressively bothering tourists along The Market and in other locations.

A year ago, the city adopted a carrot-and-stick approach that combined street peddling regulations with youth job training.

Read more in Tuesday's edition of The Post and Courier.