She saw opportunity where no one else did. Bedford-Stuyvesant was full of beautiful owner-occupied brownstones, but hardly anyone wanted insure them. Her firm would fill that void. In 1953, she also married a rising young advertising executive, John Procope. If anyone had suggested back then that this startup agency would grow to become the nation's largest minority- and woman-owned insurance brokerage, serving some of America's biggest corporations and institutions, it would have seemed as outlandish as the idea that men would walk on the moon. Ernesta Procope's story is one of a remarkable perseverance that mirrors the changes in American life and the insurance industry for minorities over the past 56 years. The secret of her success is as simple as it is hard to duplicate: "I don't give up," she said. The daughter of Caribbean immigrants, she was the only female in her family, and having to stick up for herself among her brothers made her tougher, she said. Music was her first love, and she became a piano prodigy who debuted at Carnegie Hall at age 13. But that didn't guarantee her a living, so she went into business.

In the 1950s and 1960s, Procope sold insurance but focused her prodigious energies on real estate development, rehabilitating and selling about 500 brownstones in Brooklyn from 1955 through 1970. In March 1956, she was featured on the cover of Jet magazine, under the headline: "New York's lady builder–The first Negro woman to build homes in New York state."

When the real estate market fell victim to a cyclical recession, Procope redoubled her efforts to increase her insurance business. To convince insurance companies to insure her customers, she hired limousines and ferried insurance executives from Manhattan to Brooklyn to show that property in Bedford Stuyvesant was valuable and insurable. "They didn't know that Bedford-Stuyvesant had substantial, middle-class homeowners, blacks and whites, who needed and deserved coverage," she said. "They were shocked."