Entrepreneur breaks gender, race barriers, creates opportunities for minority communities.(Insurer Topics)(insurance agency owner Ernesta Procope)

Byline: JOANNE WOJCIK

If she were a betting woman, Ernesta Procope would probably say she was a long shot.

The odds were certainly against a black woman succeeding in business in the poverty-stricken Brooklyn neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant in the 1950s, long before the civil rights and women's movements.

But Ms. Procope isn't one to listen to conventional wisdom.

"I've never operated with a complex whether I'm a woman or a black woman or black,'' says the founder, president and chief executive officer of E.G. Bowman Co. Inc. "To me, it doesn't matter. I'm out there trying to make a buck. And if you don't like me because of what I am, that's your problem. That's the only way to look at it. Otherwise, I'd go crazy.''

Indeed, this tough-girl attitude, developed early in life in a family with three older brothers, has been Ms. Procope's driving force.

Upon the death of her first husband in 1952, Ms. Procope, formerly Ernesta Bowman, opened a homeowners and auto insurance agency in a Brooklyn …