Leon Sullivan

Leon Howard Sullivan (born October 16, 1922 in Charleston , West Virginia , † April 24, 2001 in Scottsdale , Arizona ) was an American Baptist pastor and civil rights activist .

Life

The African American Leon Sullivan came from a poor background. He attended Garnet High School for Blacks in his native Charleston and received a basketball and football scholarship to West Virginia State College in 1939. After a foot injury, he was forced to earn his tuition fees by working in a steel mill. Sullivan then moved to the Union Theological Seminary in New York City . During this time he was an assistant minister at the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem . His active participation in the civil rights movement began in the early 1940s. Sullivan helped organize a march on Washington, DC . He moved to Philadelphia in 1950 , where he became the head of the Zion Baptist Church. He was a popular preacher whose church was growing rapidly. Sullivan believed that jobs were critical to improving the lives of African Americans. He organized a boycott of large Philadelphia companies that were unwilling to invite young African-Americans for interviews. The boycotts were successful, and Martin Luther King invited Sullivan to organize a similar boycott in Atlanta in the early 1960s . Sullivan also created an African American education center, the Opportunities Industrialization Center (OIC), and a founding initiative for African American businesses, the Zion Investment Association (ZIA).

In the 1970s, Leon Sullivan turned to the anti- apartheid movement. He became the first African American board member of General Motors in 1971 and attempted to use the company's economic power to influence the government of South Africa . In 1977 he published the Sullivan Principles , a code of conduct for American companies active in South Africa, which included detailed anti-discrimination measures. In the 1980s, Sullivan was a co-organizer of the global boycotts, during which companies ceased operations in South Africa. In 1988 he retired as pastor of Zion Baptist Church. With Adamou Moumouni Djermakoye , Niger's ambassador to the United States, he organized the first African-African American Summit in Ivory Coast . The biennial event is a discussion forum dedicated to improving living conditions in sub-Saharan Africa through economic development, debt relief , industrialization, education and health. In 1992, Sullivan was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom . After Nelson Mandela's election in 1994, he sought to attract foreign companies to South Africa. He had the Sullivan Principles for the Global Sullivan Principles of Corporate Social Responsibility drawn up with experts from politics and business , which were presented by Kofi Annan in 1999 . These are ethical guidelines for multinational companies that can be implemented around the world and whose goals are the promotion of human rights , social justice and economic fairness. In the United States, around a hundred companies have committed to the goals of the Global Sullivan Principles of Corporate Social Responsibility .

Fonts

• Build, brother, build . Macrae Smith, Philadelphia 1969.
• Alternatives to Despair . Judson Press, Valley Forge 1972.
• Moving Mountains. The Principles and Purposes of Leon Sullivan . Judson Press, Valley Forge 1998, ISBN 0-8170-1289-3 .

Web links

• The Leon H. Sullivan Foundation (English)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c} Leon H. Sullivan. (No longer available online.) West Virginia Division of Culture and History, archived from the original February 8, 2007 ; accessed on November 15, 2013 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
2. ↑ ^{a b c d} Lauren Pisieczko: Sullivan, Leon Howard. (No longer available online.) In: Pennsylvania Literary Map. Pennsylvania Center for the Book, archived from the original May 1, 2013 ; accessed on November 15, 2013 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
3. ↑ Chaïbou Maman: Répertoire biographique des personnalités de la classe politique et des leaders d'opinion du Niger de 1945 à nos jours . Volume II. Démocratie 2000, Niamey 2003, p. 339 .