Leon Sullivan

Reverend Dr. Leon Howard Sullivan (October 16, 1922 - April 24, 2001) was a Baptist minister, a civil rights leader and social activist focusing on the creation of job training opportunities for African-Americans, a longtime General Motors Board Member, and an important part of the dismantling of Apartheid in South Africa. Rev. Sullivan died on April 24, 2001, of leukemia at a Scottsdale, Arizona hospital. He was 78.

Early life

Born to Charles and Helen Sullivan in Charleston, West Virginia. He was raised in a small house in a dirt alley in one of Charleston's poorest sections. Sullivan has often re-told the event which set a course for the remainder of his life. At the age of twelve, he tried to purchase a Coca-Cola in a drugstore on Capitol Street. The proprietor refused to sell him the drink, saying, "Stand on your feet, boy. You can't sit here." This incident inspired Sullivan's lifetime pursuit of fighting racial prejudice.

Sullivan also attributed much of his early influence to his grandmother:

(…) my grandmother Carrie, a constant and powerful presence in my life who taught me early on the importance of faith, determination, faith in God, and especially self-help.

Sullivan attended Charleston's Garnet High School for blacks and received a basketball and football scholarship to West Virginia State College in 1939. A foot injury ended his athletic career and forced Sullivan to pay for college by working in a steel mill.

Baptist Minister

Sullivan became a Baptist minister in West Virginia at the age of 18. During a visit to West Virginia, noted black minister Adam Clayton Powell convinced Sullivan to move to New York to attend the Union Theological Seminary. He also served as Powell's assistant minister at the Abyssinian Baptist Church. In 1945 Sullivan and his wife Grace moved to South Orange, NJ where Sullivan became pastor at First Baptist Church. 5 years later, Sullivan would become pastor of Zion Baptist Church in urban Philadelphia. Known there as "the Lion of Zion" he served from 1950 to 1988, eventually increasing its membership from 600 to 6,000 - making it one of the largest congregations in America. Sullivan took his first active role in the civil rights movement by helping to organize a march on Washington, D.C. in the early 1940s.

Selective Patronage Movement

Sullivan believed jobs were the key to improving African-American lives and starting in 1958 he asked that the city's largest companies interview young blacks. Only two companies responded positively so Sullivan organized a boycott of various businesses which he referred to as "Selective Patronage". The boycott was extremely effective since blacks constituted about 20 percent of Philadelphia's population. Sullivan estimated the boycott produced thousands of jobs for African Americans in a period of four years. By 1962, the effectiveness of Sullivan's Boycotts came to the attention of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr and the SCLC who persuaded Sullivan to share information with them on his success. The exchange led to SCLC's economic arm, Operation Breadbasket, in 1967, headed by Jesse Jackson.

Self-Help Movement

Reverend Sullivan's work was built on the principle of "self-help," which provides people with the tools to help themselves overcome barriers of poverty and oppression. African Americans had been excluded from the types of training which led to better paying jobs. Reverend Sullivan realized that simply making jobs available was not enough. He said,

I found that we needed training. Integration without preparation is frustration.

In 1964, Reverend Sullivan founded Opportunities Industrialization Centers (OIC) of America in an abandoned jail house in North Philadelphia. The program took individuals with little hope and few prospects and offered them job training and instruction in life skills and then helped place them into jobs. The movement quickly spread around the nation. With sixty (60) affiliated programs in thirty (30) states and the District of Columbia, OIC has grown into a movement, which has served over two (2) million disadvantaged and under-skilled people. This approach also led to the formation of the Opportunities Industrialization Centers International (OICI) in 1969. Around the same time, Sullivan established the Zion Investment Association (ZIA), a company which invested in and started new businesses. Ge also helped to establish more than 20 programs under the International Foundation for Education and Self-Help (IFESH), including the Global Sullivan Principles initiative. Other IFESH programs include the African-African American Summit (now renamed the Leon H. Sullivan Summit), the Peoples Investment Fund for Africa, the Self-Help Investment Program, Teachers for Africa and Schools for Africa. IFESH has placed teachers in Africa, trained African bankers, built schools, developed small businesses, disseminated books and school supplies, created literacy programs, distributed medicines to prevent river-blindness and helped to combat the spread of HIV/AIDS.

The 10-36 Plan

Inspired by a well-known parable from the Bible, Rev. Sullivan decided to use the church as a vehicle for organizing the black community to consolidate its resources and build a community-owned economic base. In 1962, during one of his Sunday sermons, he introduced his congregation to his vision of self-help through community investment. "One day I preached a sermon at Zion about Jesus feeding the five thousand with a few loaves and a few fish," he recalls. "Everybody put in their little bit and you had enough to feed everybody, and a whole lot left over. So I said, that is what I am going to do with the church and the community. I said, I am going to ask 50 people to put $10 down for 36 months of loaves and fishes and see if we could accumulate resources enough to build something that we would own ourselves." Although Rev. Sullivan had expected about 50 families to sign up for the 10-36 Plan, the response was overwhelming. Over 200 joined the plan that Sunday morning. His idea of bringing people together to invest in a community-owned enterprise had caught fire.

The concept of the 10-36 Plan was to create two separate legal entities. For the first 16 months of the subscription period, investors would contribute to the Zion Non-Profit Charitable Trust (ZNPCT), a Community Development Corporation (CDC) that would support education, scholarships for youth, health services and other programs aimed at social uplift. For the remaining 20 months of the subscription period, investors would make payments to a for-profit corporation, Progress Investment Associates (PIA), which would undertake income-generating projects. At the end of 36 months, subscribers would receive one share of common voting stock and would be entitled to participate in yearly shareholders meetings. As William Downes, the treasurer of the 10-36 Plan and the executive director of ZNPCT explains, the idea of the voting system was to encourage community involvement in the plan.

According to Rev. Sullivan's philosophy, it was important for people to begin by contributing to the nonprofit side of the effort in order to develop a psychology of giving before receiving. It was also important for people to learn basic economic concepts and to see the 10-36 Plan as a long-term investment. Although stockholders were told that they would eventually receive a dividend, they were cautioned not to expect to obtain profits right away. Their most immediate monetary benefit would be a tax deduction for their contributions to the nonprofit. To participate in the 10-36 Plan, investors had to have faith in the idea of investing in a secure future for the next generation. Rev. Sullivan's vision was to use the tools of the free enterprise system to foster something that is vital to community progress - a sense of ownership and a stake in the common good.

Funds accumulated rapidly under the 10-36 Plan, and were soon used to invest in numerous housing and economic development initiatives. In 1964, PIA made its first investment in an 8-unit apartment building in an all-white community. The rationale for buying this property was that it would help address a long-standing problem facing blacks - racial discrimination in housing. The leaders of the Progress Movement believed that money often has the power to speak louder than words in the struggle to improve race relations. One year after its first investment in housing, PIA built Zion Gardens, a middle-income garden apartment complex in North Philadelphia. The $1 million project was financed by using 10-36 funds to leverage a loan from the Federal Housing Administration and a grant from the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).

While pursuing these development projects, Zion continued to build an equity base through the 10-36 Plan. In 1965, the plan was opened to new subscribers from Zion's congregation, and another 450 joined. Over the years, the Progress Movement has had great success with its strategy of using equity accumulated under the 10-36 Plan to leverage funds from public and private sources, including commercial banks and insurance companies.

Progress Plaza

After establishing the OIC in the mid-1960s, Zion's next major undertaking was the fulfillment of Rev. Sullivan's dream of building the nation's first black-owned and developed shopping center. In addition to addressing his concern about the lack of black ownership of major businesses in America, the project would deal with the problem of unemployment in North Philadelphia by generating a substantial number of jobs. After convincing the city's Redevelopment Authority to donate land for the project, Rev. Sullivan set out to raise the capital needed to build the shopping center. "So I went to the chairman of the bank and I said, I want a construction loan," he recounts. "He said, well Reverend, you need some equity for something like this. Think about it and come back later in two, three or four years, and let's see what we can do." Rev. Sullivan was already prepared for that challenge, however. "Give me the sack," he told Zion's treasurer, William Downes. "I opened it up and $400,000 worth of equities came out," he describes. "The man's eye glasses fell off his eyes. He came around the table and took my hand and said, Reverend, we can work together." Rev. Sullivan's theory about the power of money to deal with persistent racial inequalities was proving to be correct. As he concludes:

I found that $400,000 makes a difference in race relations in America!

Progress Plaza, which is located on Broad Street, one of Philadelphia's main thoroughfares, was dedicated in 1968 before a crowd of 10,000 well-wishers. In some sense, the shopping center was the culmination of the Progress Movement's multiple goals. Because it was a major construction project, it created a large number of construction jobs for participants in the OIC program. Through an agreement negotiated with Progress Plaza's chain store tenants, the shopping center also made numerous management job opportunities available to African Americans. To fulfill another one of the Progress Movement's primary goals - to encourage the development of black-owned businesses - ZNPCT created an Entrepreneurial Training Center at Progress Plaza. With major funding from the Ford Foundation, the center was able to offer managerial and entrepreneurial skills training to hundreds of area residents. Today, over half of the 16 stores in Progress Plaza are black-owned businesses.

Another one of the Progress Movement's major goals was to address the social needs of North Philadelphia's community residents. To this end, ZNPCT built a comprehensive Human Services Center that centralizes essential services so that they are easily accessible to area residents. Zion's role was to develop the property and lease it at below-market rent to nonprofit and governmental entities whose programs fulfill ZNPCT's charitable mission. Located adjacent to Progress Plaza, the Center currently houses a Social Security Administration office, an unemployment compensation office, a police training academy, and a health service center run by Temple University.

The Sullivan Principles (the end of Aparthied)

In 1971, Sullivan joined the General Motors Board of Directors and became the first African-American on the board of a major corporation. He went on to serve on GM's board for over 20 years. In 1977, Sullivan developed a code of conduct for companies operating in South Africa called the Sullivan Principles. As an alternative to complete disinvestment from South Africa, the "Sullivan Principles" created a revolution in industrial race relations and were instrumental in dismantling apartheid. The biennial Leon H. Sullivan Summit, first held in Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire in 1991, continues to be held. To further expand human rights and economic development to all communities, Reverend Sullivan created the Global Sullivan Principles of Social Responsibility in 1997. In 1999, the Global Sullivan Principles were issued at the United Nations. This expanded code calls for multinational companies to take an active role in the advancement of human rights and social justice. Former United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan had this to say about Reverend Sullivan's contributions:

It shows how much one individual can do to change lives and societies for the better (...) He was known and respected throughout the world for the bold and innovative role he played in the global campaign to dismantle the system of apartheid in South Africa.

Awards and Honors

In 1963, Life Magazine cited Reverend Sullivan as one of the 100 outstanding young adults in the United States . Among his many other honors, in 1971 Sullivan was awarded the in Spingarn Medal by the NAACP, in 1992 he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by George H.W. Bush, the highest civilian award given in the United States. In 1987 Reverend Sullivan was given the Four Freedoms Award for "Freedom of Worship" by the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute. In 1995 Sullivan was given the Bishop John T. Walker Distinguished Humanitarian Service Award by Africare an award given "to recognize those whose work has made a significant impact on raising the standard of living in Africa". In 1999 he was awarded the Eleanor Roosevelt Award for Human Rights by Bill Clinton. During his lifetime he was also awarded honorary doctorate degrees from over 50 colleges and universities.

Books by Leon H. Sullivan

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Moving Mountains: The Principles and Purposes of Leon Sullivan

• America is theirs: And other poems (1948)
• Build Brother Build (1969)
• Alternatives to Despair (1972)
• Philosophy of a Giant (1979)
• Moving Mountains: The Principles and Purposes of Leon Sullivan (1998)

External links

• Rev. Leon H. Sullivan Official Website
• The Leon H. Sullivan Foundation
• Opportunities Industrialization Centers of America
• Opportunities Industrialization Centers International
• Leon Sullivan Health Care Center, nursing home in Seattle, Washington
• Presidential Medal of Freedom citation - Leon H. Sullivan (1992)