Earl was born in 1935 in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York, USA. The son of a homemaker and a garment-industry worker, Earl attended school in Brooklyn and went on to attend the historically Black college Morgan State University. Possessing an entrepreneurial mindset from a young age, Earl sold boxed Christmas cards for his uncle as a teenager and worked several jobs during his university years, including stints as a security guard, grass cutter, and flower salesman for local florists during homecoming week.

After graduating from Morgan State, Earl served in the U.S. Army, and then returned to Brooklyn, working in law enforcement and real estate. Civic-minded Earl also volunteered with local government and community groups, including one headed by then-Senator Robert F. Kennedy dedicated to improving Bedford-Stuyvesant.

In 1968, Earl secured a seat on the advisory board of the Small Business Association (SBA), where he began to recognize an information void—there was no place businesses could find advice related to economic development and urban affairs. In response, he created an annual newsletter that included issues relevant to African American businesspeople and entrepreneurs; it also helped raise awareness of the power of Black consumers. In 1970, at the urging of SBA Director Howard J. Samuels, Earl expanded the annual newsletter into a magazine, and in August of that year, the first issue of Black Enterprise hit newsstands.

In launching Black Enterprise, Earl set up an advisory board of Black professionals from around the country. To build the audience, Earl sent free copies of the magazine to African-American businesspeople, ministers, and politicians, as well as to corporate offices. By the early 2000s, Black Enterprise boasted a print circulation of half of million copies and was held up alongside business and economic publications such as Forbes, Money, and Fortune. Today, the magazine lives on in digital format online, accessible to entrepreneurs around the world, and Earl’s companies expanded to include publishing, marketing, radio, television, event coordination, and management consulting.

In 1997, Earl published How to Succeed in Business without Being White: Straight Talk on Making it in America. The book, which became a New York Times best seller, was a no-nonsense approach to business and included lessons on networking, maximizing career opportunities, and building wealth. Earl believed that Black Americans needed only equal opportunities to achieve success, not special treatment, and he expounded on this idea in the book. Earl sat on the boards of several other major corporations, including Aetna, American Airlines, and DaimlerChrysler. He also served on the board of Howard University and was inducted into the Global Business Hall of Fame in 2007. Earl passed away in early 2020.