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Jessica Ann Levy, "Black Power, Inc.: Corporate America and the Rise of Multinational Empowerment Politics" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2026)
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Hi everyone. I want to tell you all about another podcast I think you'll enjoy. College Matters from the Chronicle College Matters is a weekly show from the Chronicle of Higher Education, and it's a great resource for news and analysis about colleges and universities. You'll hear sharp discussions with Chronicle journalists offering fresh perspectives on the latest salvos from the Trump administration and keen insights about how faculty and students are adapting to technological changes. College Matters also features incisive interviews with newsmakers, including recent conversations with Chris Eisgruber, Princeton University's president, and Rick Singer, who is best known as the mastermind of the Varsity Blues admissions scandal. Check out College Matters wherever you get your podcasts.
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Welcome to the New Books Network
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Good morning everyone and welcome to the New Books Network. Today we are honored to have Dr. Jessica Ann Levy. She is an assistant professor in the History Department at Purchase College in New York. She's a historian of modern America with interest in racism, capitalism and politics at the local, national and global level. Her work explores how dynamic movements, including those demanding racial justice and an end to global apartheid, challenged and were ultimately incorporated into institutions representing the US Government and multinational corporations. Jessica's current book, Black Power, Corporate America, Race and Empowerment Politics in the US And Africa, published by the University of Pennsylvania Press, combines insights and modes of analysis from the history of capitalism, business history, political political history, critical race studies, transnational history and African studies. Black Power, Inc. Brings together two narratives central to the late 20th century history, yet which have remained largely separated in the literature the history of the global Black power movement and the transnational rise of free market politics. It does so through revealing the financial, ideological and political investments made by government officials, corporate executives and black activists, entrepreneurs and Black empowerment politics. Defined as private and public programs promoting job training, community development and black entrepreneurship, Black empowerment increasingly supplanted more radical demands for economic justice and reparations Amid the late 20th century transition from Jim Crow to a post apartheid global economy. Jessica shows how advocates of black empowerment appropriated older intellectual traditions and this is key for me, including Christian uplift and a patriarchal African African traditionalism and gave them new life through associating them with skills, entrepreneurship manager managership touted as the keys to success in a globalizing economy and aided by the US Government and US corporations, Black empowerment ventures have become a hallmark of post Jim Crow post colonial policy landscapes governing black communities from North Philadelphia to Soweto by centering private capital alongside state power. Black Empower, Inc. Furthermore explains how American capitalism profited from black militancy, racial liberalism and the seeds of political conservatism and that blossom within the global black freedom struggle. Welcome, Jessica. How are you today? And as you answer that, give us a little bit more about why you came to this research and how it just got into your head. And we'll start there and then we'll go to that question.
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Sure. Well, thank you. Thank you. It's really a privilege to be here and to have a chance to talk about the book, which is still very fresh with you and with the listeners. Yeah, I came to this. This book, you know, came out of my dissertation research, but even before that, it really came out of my experience living in Atlanta, Georgia in the 2000s, and a city that is touted by many as. As a black mecca also. Right. The. The home of the civil rights movement, the home of. Of Martin Luther King Jr. And a city which is also deeply still shaped by racial inequality and segregation. And, you know, there are other. Many other places which I touch on in the book, and we'll talk about the various locations this book visits. But that city, to me, it raised a question for me. It raised a question about the legacies of the civil rights and the black power movements in terms of the role of both that black entrepreneurship plays, but also that corporations, Coca Cola Delta, big corporations coming out of Atlanta. What role did they play in shaping black politics both there and elsewhere? And that question is one I spent many, many years trying to answer, and one I think that hopefully some answers are in this book. Black Power, Inc.
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So when. When we first began to talk, I explained to you different world episodes about the differing ideologies to divestment by students. And we were talking about two students from Africa, both from the Soweto region. One whose father worked for a company, an American company that was in Africa that was supplying scholarships and supplementing programs in American university, and one whose friend was killed in the Soweto uprising against apartheid. Thinking about those two different dynamics, can you help us understand that the tension that existed with students. Let's stay in Africa for a minute. The tension that existed within students that were living in Africa being surrounded by these American corporations that were trying to flush out, get rid of apartheid through their corporate measures. I'd be interested to see how you explain that dynamic to us.
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Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, the. The book title, kind of Black Power, Inc. Really kind of is. Is centers, the main argument, right. That that kind of. There's this process that I'm looking at whereby corporations and movements, including most notably the anti apartheid movement, become incorporated. And I mean that in A variety of different ways in terms of embracing business, but also literally kind of being pulled up and appropriated into the corporation. And we see that with the anti apartheid struggle. So from the perspective of, you know, US Corporations in South Africa, in some sense this is a very, you know, familiar. It might be a familiar story to many, which is that, you know, apartheid, South African apartheid created the most profitable system on earth, right? This is Cedric Robinson's idea of racial capitalism. One which talks about the. The kind of inextricability of race and capitalism is actually based on his experiences and discussions with South Africans talking about the apartheid system. So on, on one hand, right, South Africa creates this, this melding of. Of profit and racism and segregation and exploitation and racialized violence. And we see that in, in the Soweto uprising and the massacre of black students protesting apartheid. We see it right in, in the violence of apartheid system, right, which was not just about keeping people separate, but was about keeping black Africans subordinated and disempowered and disenfranchised and therefore, you know, dependent on. On. On jobs, meager jobs, right? Provided them through the apartheid system. And US Corporations profited from this immensely. We were, were there from the beginning of apartheid and profited significantly. And the anti apartheid movement as it's, as it's forming and taking shape, right, because of this, recognizing this puts divestment very early on, as early as the late 1950s, early 60s, right, as one of the kind of central aims of the movement, right? To say, okay, in order, because of the inextricability of capitalism and apartheid, and to end apartheid, we need to get capitalism, we need to undo capitalism, we need to divest. And this is a call that comes from within South Africa. It's one that, you know, gets taken up across the world over the course of, of the second half of the 20th century, culminating in, in the, the 1980s. At the same time, right? As part of this kind of, you know, there are two other different things going on here, right, that, that, you know, there's. There's no monolithic, right. Black South Africa, right? There are those within South Africa, including black South Africans, who were employed by US Corporations like General Motors, like Ford, like Coca Cola, and who received their livelihood from these companies, right? And so, you know, had. Had real complicated feelings about divestment, right, because of the personal hardship that it would cause. And then there's also an important shift, and that's kind of the shift I talk about in this book, which is in response to pressure from divestment activists in response to the pressure of, you know, both within South Africa, but also the international anti apartheid movement, corporations, and particularly US Corporations begin to kind of, instead of just, I shouldn't say ignoring apartheid, but instead of sort of just kind of taking no stance on apartheid, which is, was kind of the, the status quo for, for much of the 50s and 60s, begin to kind of embrace this idea of corporate sponsored black empowerment or corporate social responsibility. What if US corporations adopt many of the policies, many of the programs that they've already adopted in the United States in response to the end of Jim Crow, Things like voluntary affirmative action, things like employing black supervisors and managers, things like supporting black businesses, donating to black banks, being engaged in the black community, providing scholarships for, for black students, including black African, Black South Africans to come to the US and study. And they start to do that as, as part of a political move, right, to kind of counter divestment. But this right has, has a real impact on black South Africans, right? There are black South Africans who, who are getting opportunities, who are making money, who are having their lives transformed by corporations. And so this creates tension. And I also would say opportunity in which is a kind of keyword of this moment. It creates an opening for a kind of divergence in the anti apartheid struggle. And there's the kind of familiar story that I think we know, which is that the history of divestment has. And one of the things my book tries to shed light on is this kind of, this alternative trajectory of the anti apartheid movement where we see black South Africans, black business people, black activists engaging, partnering with corporations on kind of promoting an alternative visions of corporations being able to promote black empowerment. And this is both important for kind of during apartheid, but it's really important for thinking about what happens after the end of apartheid and the role that corporations play in a post apartheid South Africa.
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I want to go back to your main characters, Reverend Leon Sullivan and Samuel Monteswany.
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Matsuyane. Matsuyane.
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Matuyane. Okay, but before we go there, I kind of want to stick in this divestment for a reason. So I want to bring the attention back to the United States. And the reason I'm saying this is this. Okay, So I was teaching at Morgan State University during a time when Coca Cola actually was sending students over on scholarship. I was teaching. And the students from Africa who came to Morgan, I'm trying to be politically correct here, they did not adapt to the environment. And the reason that they didn't adapt to the environment is because they came over with this sense of entitlement is that we're from Africa. We know more than you are. We don't have a shared history. And that's where I'm at. We don't have a shared history. It is nothing that we share with American black people. And when you hear them use the word black people, it was such this negative connotation, this negative tone of black people. Keep that in mind. And I'm going to talk about emory University. So 191, 192. And when I read about Emory University being a Methodist college, and the reason I'm bringing Emory and Morgan together is because Morgan, if you remember from Maryland, Morgan was a Methodist seminary as well. That's how it got started. Morgan is not a traditional hbcu. It started by being a Methodist seminary, teaching black men how to be Methodist preachers in the state of Maryland. So there is a shared history with these two universities, the foundation of it all. So Emory decides to not divest, to stay, keep investing in black Africa. But the biggest thing that I want to talk about is the pushback, the resistance that Emory faces, especially from the historian that you mentioned, 191, of Kristin Mann and then her associate Irving and then her associate Jacqueline Irving. And their main concern was one of the biggest, the biggest fights that we faced in the United States that I faced because I was on the plane of Jacqueline Irving. You all are so focused on apartheid and Africa, and yet you bring these students over, they don't want to be involved with our blacks, our African American students. And then the focus on apartheidis increases. And as that increases, the focus on domestic racial uplift and programs decreases. All of a sudden, is what my father used to say, who was a civil rights activist, is that when something new appears in the space, then all of a sudden black America has become the afterthought. And it's not just with this black empowerment, anti apartheid movement. It's with everything. It's with everything. So how, how, how does this resistance. Because Emory, I feel, reminds me of the idea of the white man's burden. It's our burden to, you know, Rudyard Kipling's book White Man's Burden just remind you, connected all these dots for me and, and reminds me that the focus on Africa and saving it from a colonialized world and trying to pull it through a post colonialized world, it negated what was going on in the United States and within their own, within their own communities. And I think Jacqueline Irving made a very good point that as increase in apartheid measures, as a increase in that it decreased in racial uplift. Talk to me.
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Yeah, so, I mean, first, right. I think it's important to acknowledge there is a long shared history between, you know, black Americans and black South Africans, including, you know, through the connections of the, the AME Church and the, you know, the African Methodist Episcopal Church dating back to the late 19th century. There's a shared dialog and, and the, the movement, the black freedom struggle in the United States and the, and the, the long black freedom struggle in South Africa are deeply interconnected in, you know, the, you know, the, the ANC having. The African National Congress, having gotten its start in part inspired by the NAACP and inspired by the, the activism of people like Booker T. Washington as well as W.E.B. dubois and Marcus Garvey. Right. All of, all of those figures play an important role in kind of the early anti apartheid struggle in South Africa. You know, the move that happens in the 1980s, in particular with the anti apartheid movement, I think is really interesting because there is something, you know, there is an attempt kind of within, you know, the American black freedom struggle, within the kind of civil rights and especially kind of black power activism, right, to, to transnationalize the struggle. You know, we can talk about Malcolm X, we can talk about, you know, the Black Panthers. And there's a kind of radical vision, right, which, which relies on seeing, right, these movements as linked and, and seeing the anti apartheid struggle as an outgrowth, as an extension. Right. Of the black liberation struggle, which is, is also right. If, if we're going kind of, you know, real militant, radical black pan, black power, right. Is, is also a struggle to liber from America, right. And the kind of racial oppression here. But what you were mentioning, right, is there's a moment in the 1980s where anti apartheid, I argue in the book and others, right, have, have said that the anti apartheid kind of movement moves from a kind of radical, I don't want to say, you know, fringe in the way that that sort of dismisses it, but, but a kind of being a left leaning progressive movement in the United States to becoming more mainstream and to becoming kind of liberal, it makes its way into institutions, including universities. Right. And it does so because of the activism of students. Right. Students and the youth are leading this struggle. But as it does, right. Universities and corporations and their corporate sponsors are kind of trying to re situate the anti apartheid struggle and re. Situate themselves with the Indian party struggle. So I kind of chart this story through Emory, which is actually my alma mater. Kristin Mann was one of my first history professors. I don't know if she actually knows that she's made it into my book. But no, yeah, but I look at Emory because Emory does have this longer tradition as a Methodist school of having a kind of missionary, outward facing vision. But it's not actually until the 1980s that Emory begins to really become a global university. What we would kind of think now as a university that's, that's positioning itself not just as a regional school in the south, but as a school trying to kind of make its mark on the world. And today Emory, very much right, is a global institution, you know, with visitors like the Dalai Lama and others. And it's interesting because they do that or they start to do that. I see through the anti apartheid struggle. They, following a path that many other universities took, they chose not to fully divest, but they chose a kind of partial divestment. They said, we are going to continue supporting companies that abide by this kind of corporate code of conduct known as the Sullivan Principles, named after Leon Sullivan, one of the main figures in the book. But we're basically going to support companies that we think are taking a kind of socially responsible approach in South Africa right through that promotion of black empowerment. And we're going to bring over black South African students and we're going to have scholarships. And this is how Emory is going to kind a name for itself on, on the world stage. This is kind of a, you know, a, a moment right, where they're kind of capitalizing on, on, on the anti apartheid kind of struggle and, and a chance to kind of take the moral, you know, kind of get some moral capital here and, and actual financial capital. Because like Morehouse, you know, Emory has many important corporate donors. No more uh, no other as important as Coca Cola, which uh, had at the time given the largest corporate donation to any university in basically investing in Emory. And it's interesting. So I read through, as part of my research, I read through the meeting minutes of this kind of committee that's formed at Emory to debate the question of divestment. And the two people who sort of raise questions, who sort of push back against the decision not to fully divest are the one African historian Kristen Mann, who, who says in her comments, I'm all for, right, more support for African studies, right. And bringing African students. But I, I still think that divestment is the right way. And Jacqueline Irvin, who is the sole African American on the committee, the sole person of color on the committee, who makes the point, as, as you are mentioning, right, that at the time that Emory and other institutions and Big corporations like Coca Cola are kind of moving to try to claim this moral high ground in the anti apartheid movement by saying, look, we can help South Africa through black empowerment. Are making the point, right, that the US still has not really addressed, has not fully addressed its, you know, issues of racial inequality, its issues of segregation. Irvine, you know, makes specifically, you know, Emory remains a very white campus in the 1980s, and in a city that while, you know, on. On one level is kind of touted as a city of racial progress, as a black, you know, Mecca has a black mayor, is, Is still dealing with high rates of racial inequality and, and segregation and says, you know, we need to. Yeah, we need to take care of this issue at home, you know, and that it also kind of highlights the ways in which through kind of universities like Emory and through corporations kind of taking up this black empowerment politics there, they themselves are kind of writing a certain history of America that is being contested, right? They're saying, you know, we can do this. We can show South Africa the way because we've already done it ourselves, right? We've made it past Jim Crow and these voices like Irving and like man are saying, have we?
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Right, Right. And that's exactly where your analysis took me. It took me to Emory thought that they have, they can show the world something on an international stage. But had we made it through? We hadn't made it through civil rights, Atlanta hadn't made it through segregation. So how can you show what we haven't done? And then I like that it introduced this idea of the moral high ground. That's, I think, what was happening with the students and the universities. All of a sudden, social responsibility and this act, this thing of moral high ground starts to interject its way in the 80s and 90s, because I remember that was one of the tenets that Morgan said, we are a socially responsible college. We are going to take the moral high ground. We are going to bring these students over and work with them. So is that your 80s and 90s? You build them as these decades of convergence and divergence, of complexity, of actually fluctuation movement wasn't static. And what I see is that black empowerment starts to fluctuate quite a bit because I think resistance to it starts to push in a little harder than your earlier movements. But before we go there, let's go back a little bit. Let's talk about your two characters through the eyes of Booker T. Washington, Reverend Leon Sullivan and Samuel Masiani. There you go. I just don't want to mess up his name. Why these Two characters. Why Leon Sullivan, why Samuel Masiani, and why the eyes of Booker T. Washington?
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Yeah, so what Bridget is referring to is the first chapter of the book, which is called Booker T's Ghost. Really takes us back to the. To the late 19th and early 20th century, right. Highlighting how the kinds of ideas that I'm talking about here have a long history, have multiple roots. But one important, really important figure here is Booker T. Washington. And I sort of chart his kind of long influence on the development of black empowerment politics through these two figures of Leon Sullivan, who. Civil rights Baptist minister out of. Well, out of West Virginia. He grew up eight miles from Booker T. Washington's childhood home, but eventually makes his way to North Philadelphia. And Samuel Matsuyan, who is a Swana businessman growing up on South Africa's highvel kind of around Johannesburg area, ends up becoming an important figure in the kind of black business organization there. And, you know, I can talk about right there. This book is. Is not a biography of either figure. Both figures had incredible lives, are well known in their context. Well, Sullivan is. Is known in South Africa as well. I think Matsuyani is known a little bit less. You know, didn't make the same kind of impact on. On the U.S. but it's very well known in South Africa as a kind of leading black businessman. But the book rather uses these figures as guides to. To try to kind of illustrate the evolution. Right. As you said, kind of this. The. There's a, you know, black empowerment politics evolves over time, and it's informed by other politics of racial uplift. So the first chapter really highlights Booker T. Washington, who himself.
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Right.
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Had a kind of international
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following.
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Right. And I think people, we often forget this about Booker T. Washington. We kind of focus on his. His role in, you know, in the US and, and in kind of promoting racial uplift and, and Tuskegee. But his ideas, right, about racial uplift, about particularly a kind of Christian industrial education. Right. Were influential throughout the diaspora. And. And so I use that as a kind of moment to set the stage for what black empowerment's politics is going to, you know, do basically, you know, 60 years later, which is a kind of a transnational dialogue that is taking place on both sides of the Atlantic about what is the direction forward, you know, for. For people of African descent in these important moments, right after Reconstruction and then after. Right. The formal end of Jim Crow and apartheid. Right. These.
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That.
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That this conversation is not just taking place locally, that there are these kind of transnational dialogues. And so I kind of highlight the Ways in which both Sullivan and Matsiani as they're growing up, they're growing up in the heart of segregation, right? Sullivan is born in the 1920s. Matsuyani is as well. They're kind of coming of age in the middle of, you know, first Jim Crow and apartheid. And in this context, right, Business and kind of private entrepreneurship, self help politics, this idea of kind of individual but also community, communal kind of initiative here, right. Takes on real prominence in both places, right? This is a hard time to kind of protest directly against, against the state. The state is not, you know, is not an ally to either of these, these communities. And so I, I highlight kind of the ways in which kind of Booker T. Washington's ideas and Booker T. Washington, you know, has had a, a reputation as, as being an accommodationist. I think people a lot of work to kind of revise that and to say, like look at the, you know, given the context, given the context of, of the Jim Crow south, these, you know, this, these ideas were, were about survival. These ideas were, you know, in some sense this idea of kind of, you know, picking yourself up by your own bootstraps because nobody else is coming, right?
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But it's the child that has its own.
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Yeah. And so, so I show how Booker T. Washington and just more broadly this idea of kind of racial uplift, but also a kind of real emphasis on, on business and industrial education and, and training kind of permeated the, the childhoods of these two main figures, Sullivan and Matiani. And then where I, where I take that then is kind of thinking about how both Sullivan and Matsuyani in, in their respective spheres of the US And South Africa and they'll eventually meet up again. How they kind of modernize racial uplift, how they adapt this much older tradition, right, that kind of emerges really out of an agricultural world, right? Kind of focused on farming. Matsuyani in particular remains a farmer till, till the end of his life. But how they adapt that for a rapidly urbanizing black metropolis. So I moved to places like Harlem to, and particularly North Philadelphia, but also Soweto, a black township in Johannesburg. And think about how is racial uplift politics, which kind of gets its start in this, you know, late 19th, early 20th century in a kind of rural location adapts and gets kind of reformulated as black empowerment politics in the 1960s and the 1970s. But there being a kind of very urban, very industry focused politics, right, with kind of different problems of, you know, de. Industrialization, which is not, you know, something that Booker T. Washington has to kind of Think about how that kind of. How that gets reformatted in the late 20th century.
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I have two questions for you. Black empowerment. Did black empowerment push or add energy to the black power movement? And the other question is, if the black empowerment movement wasn't linked to the anti apartheid movement, what will be the success in the United States of black
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empowerment, of black empowerment?
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Right. So the questions are, did black empowerment give energy to the black power movement? Was a black power movement stagnant in the 60s and the 70s? Because I'm going to argue that it was because I was living it, my father was fighting it. And it seemed like the internal struggles between Martin Luther King and the SNCC movement and the internal struggles between Martin Luther King and his board and Martin Luther King and the churches caused the black power movement to be stagnant. Was one of the reasons that the Black Panthers was able to push in, because they picked up the idea, if we do daycare centers, if we take care of community, if we take care of our people locally, then we will force this idea of racial equality. So when Leon Sullivan pushes out OIC centers and the black empowerment movement, does it give energy to the black power movement in the 60s and 70s? And then my second question was, did we need to link to the anti apartheid movement in order for the black empowerment movement to be as successful as you write about in your book?
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Those are two very interesting questions. Yeah, I think the way I narrate the relationship, you know, I think black empowerment and black power politics obviously have a. Have a. A linked history. Right. Black empowerment is. Is a. And I trace in the book, briefly, a kind of intellectual history of the term black empowerment, which comes out of the late 1960s in response to black power. I see these movements as. Yeah. Emerging out of this. This very particular space. I see them often, you know, not to say that they don't have kind of their. Their more rural and. And other kind of variants, but that. But as. As urban politics, as trying to address the problems of. Of inner city black communities that are dealing with white flight, with capital divestment, with. With, you know, industrial restructuring. I. I actually see black empowerment politics as taking off that. That black empowerment politics got its energy in response to, I guess, the vibrancy of black power kind of. Or the, you know, for. For depending on one's perspective, I guess the, the kind of. The challenge posed by black power. So I think that, you know, the kind of argument that I make in the book is that black power kind of offered a black power. Right. Is a very Expansive category. And, and Sullivan, I should power at times. Right. He calls Progress Plaza, which is the first black owned shopping center found in North Philadelphia, Black power venture. So, so there's a shift, right, in the meaning of black power as it makes its, its way into what I, you know, call black empowerment politics. Focusing on the kind of business, focusing on the formal economy. Right. And, and again, focusing on private enterprise. These are. But, but it's a blurry line, right? Like oic, what, what Sullivan is doing in terms of OIC providing kind of community job training programs, education. Right. Bringing people into the church is not that different from what the Black Panthers are doing with their daycare centers, with their. Right. Kind of trying to harness the resources within the black community towards, you know, uplift, towards improving the material conditions. Right. Of black communities. Where I see them diverge is in terms of their relationship to the US Government, to capitalism, and, and just the broader kind of American project. And this is where I, I see a kind of a divergence and I see them feeding off of one another a more, you know, more kind of black empowerment feeding off of black power. Whereas at its most revolutionary, as it's, as its most kind of radical edge, Black power confronted, you know, American, you know, imperial capitalism. Right. The Black Panthers, you know, call. Right. And, and, and this is echoed by, you know, Malcolm X and echoed by people like Stokely Carmichael. Right. Reading Kwame and Ture. Right, that, that, yeah, that, that. Right. That the black communities are an internal colony. The United States is a colonial power. Right. And, and actually we need to, we need to overthrow the US Government. We need to overthrow the capitalist system. And where black empowerment. Well, and, and notably, right in that the kind of, the figure that, if you're right, a young, particularly black male growing up at this time, you're, you're a figure in the black. You want to be a black power activist. You're a revolutionary. Right. And you dress the garb, right. You're, you're wearing, you're, you're modeling yourself after Che Guevara, Franz Fanon. Right. The Black Panthers. So the ideal here is a militant. Yeah. Black empowerment goes a different direction. Right. They're trying to, there's a kind of turning of the movement towards integration or as I argue, incorporation into kind of the American capitalist system. Sullivan leads this protest boycott in Philadelphia. Notice the selective patronage movement which ends up taking off nationally, actually helps inspire people like Jesse Jackson and Operation Push right, to kind of pressure businesses. But what people often miss about those boycotts is that they put activists in, in the same room to negotiate with businesses, right? You have these activists, many of the ministers, negotiating the terms of desegregation. And what they're asking for, what Sullivan is very explicit about here is not to eradicate capitalism. It's to expand, right. It's to expand opportunities. It's. It's to incorporate black people into the kind of for profit system. And I show how this process institutionally takes certain organizations like oic, right, which literally has the name Opportunities Industrialization Centers Inc. And it kind of redirects their energy away from the community and towards money, towards. Right. Where's our funding come, you know, whether it's nonprofit or for profit, right? They start to get government grants, they start to get corporate sponsorships. And that kind of leads them through this kind of cycle of like, well, you know, in order to keep this operation going, we need to a certain degree appease our funders and those that institutional linkage, right. Moderates, I think, kind of some of the demands that they're able to make. And also, right, the figure here that's being pushed, right, is the black entrepreneur, is the black businessman. What black success looks like coming out of black empowerment is to be. Leon Sullivan is to join General Motors as the first black director. Right? That's a different move. So for me, particularly the funding, particularly the way that these organization OIC goes from being a single center in North Philadelphia in the 60s to a national and later international organization. And it does that because of U.S. government funding and corporate partnerships. And that, that is the kind of where I see black empowerment politics taking off. It is both a grassroots movement, but it's that institutional capital support that kind of gives it. That is coming, right. That capital support wouldn't be there without black power, without the, the kind of the challenge of, of. Of rebellion about revolution, you know, revolution. I don't think Sullivan and OIC would have gotten the same support that they did. Right. There's. There's a moment where the Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce says we need OIC like this is this organization is doing political work for us to show, you know, the black community there's an alternative to burning, you know, the city down. And, and so, yeah, the question about the kind of international linkages in the anti apartheid movement. Yeah, I think it's a really, you know, in the US the story I think is, you know, we get to the 1980s, we get to Auster, to Reagan and at that point, right, Black power has been decimated by the carceral state, by policing. Right. But you know, Black communities in general have been decimated by austerity politics. And I, and I think in some sense, yeah, I, I, I don't know what would have happened to empowerment politics in the United States without the, you know, in some sense the anti apartheid movement gives black empowerment new life abroad. It kind of comes back with, you know, Clinton's empowerment zones. I think we would have still gotten Clinton's empowerment zones, but for me, yeah, the anti apartheid struggle and, and the kind of, the application of black empowerment to South Africa really gives black empowerment politics new life. And today, like if you search for the term black empowerment, it has much more association with South Africa because of.
- [41:42]
C
I searched it. It does, yeah. So, yeah, yeah. So you opened up the door about the empowerment zones which were decimate failure, especially in Baltimore City. I did a study of the empowerment zones. My grandparents lived in one empowerment zones. West Baltimore is still decimated from the 1960s. You can't even tell if anything has been done. That's why I'm wondering do, I think, I argue that the impairment zones diverged from Leon Sullivan's concept of his oic? I say that. And I'm wondering if this divergence suggests to you an evolution of Sullivan's work in a positive or negative manner, especially within the context of the comprehensive Anti Apartheid act that came out that pushed against Sullivan's principles. Does that make sense to you?
- [42:49]
B
Yeah, yeah, a little bit. I mean, I think, you know, if we're talking about Sullivan personally, I think, you know, Sullivan and, and many of the other figures of his generation. Right. Including people like Jesse Jackson. But other lesser known figures I talk about in the book, people like Carl Ware, Harold Johnson, these figures. Andrew Young.
- [43:10]
C
Oh yes, Andrew Young and Sims. Yes.
- [43:12]
B
Yeah. These figures really get, I think, yeah. Captivated by the international stage. Right. By, by the 1980s. Sullivan is still obviously involved in OIC, but his, his day to day, his, his attention is, is focused abroad, not just on South Africa, I should say on, on the African continent more broadly. After the end of apartheid, he's going to get involved in these African, African American summits. Right. So, so that's, there is a way, I think, in that, that the kind of attention of a certain generation of black empowerment proponents gets redirected overseas and redirected to the international sphere, which is, you know, in some sense a bigger stage.
- [43:54]
C
Why, but why though?
- [43:56]
B
Why is it a bigger stage?
- [43:57]
C
No, no, why the redirection? What happened in the United States that caused such a redirection? Reagan's austerity program, Clinton's affix to that austerity program.
- [44:13]
B
Yeah, well, I think that's part of it is a part of it is the austerity is.
- [44:16]
C
Is that.
- [44:17]
B
That, you know, that the funding for, you know, including oic, which, you know, kind of despite, you know, kind of being the. The motto always OIC is about we help ourselves, right? It's. Its funding comes from the US Government and that funding is dramatically cut by Reagan. But even before Reagan, right, in the 1970s with a dramatic walking back of the war on poverty. And, and in some sense he's forced to kind of become more reliant on corporations, right? And we do see a resurgence in the black empowerment zone. So coming back, you know, to. To the empowerment zones and their relationship. I mean, in Philadelphia. So, so yeah, I mean, the. I. I mentioned a kind of similar study in the book the of nationally looking at. At black empowerment zones. And there's an interesting finding that basically says that poverty is higher in those places that were designated empowerment zones. And, and my understanding of this is basically that, you know, to become an empowerment zones, you already had to be facing high levels of unemployment, right?
- [45:17]
C
And.
- [45:18]
B
And, but empowerment zones didn't help. And, but in. In Philly, right? OIC is still around. OIC is still around today in Philly. OIC links itself to the empowerment zone. OIC kind of tries to. To center itself within sort of Clinton's empowerment zones. And there is a certain kind of repeat of what had happened in the 60s in the war on Poverty. And I am trying to make this kind of argument that in some sense, you know, Clinton is not actually doing something as different than Lyndon B. Johnson was doing in the War on Poverty. I think the War on Poverty came in a different moment when there were of different, you know, politics right There. There's a way in which the war on poverty helps to fund welfare. There's a way in which the war on poverty, you know, ends up. There's been work to show kind of funding more radical kind of black power organizations, but he's also promoting private investment corporations and through tax breaks. And that's important, right? Because that's where the government funding comes from through tax breaks in two cities. And that is exactly what Clinton does in. In the early 1990s with black empowerment zones. I think the difference to two differences. One is in the 60s, black empowerment still is very much still kind of tied. And where Sullivan's original vision is this movement coming out of the community, right. It's still an organization that is responding, is coming out of Kind of community demands, community investment. Right. The original funding for OAC comes from donations or investments from congregants of Sullivan's church. And, and I think the, you know, Clinton's empowerment zones, by the time they kind of re come around in the 1990s, it's very much a top down, outside in program that is kind of, you know, working with local leaders, but not really engaging kind of community input. So I think that community input piece gets, gets lost. And you've had the intervening decades of austerity, right? So, so the problems of unemployment, the problems of deeply entrenched poverty, that and capital flight, right, from cities has continued from the 60s to the 90s. So the problem is much bigger, I think by the time you get to, to the 90s than it, than it was in the 60s. Right. In the 60s. We still have a kind of recent history of, of cities having more robust economies, industry. And I think by the time, yeah, we get to the, the 1990s, you know, I think the communities in which black empowerment zones are, are directed at are just facing, you know, much, much bigger problems than they were in the 60s.
- [47:49]
C
So continuing that thread of thought about government desponsorship, on page 241, you have an interesting sentence quote from former President Obama. Okay, I cannot pass laws that say I'm just helping black folks. Hmm. That jumped at me like a boa snake because that was one of the problems that he dealt with during his administration and throughout your book. And as you have illuminated in this interview, the success of black empowerment was government funding, government intervention, government accepting the idea of Sullivan's principles, government accepting this idea of job training, entrepreneurship, managership. But all of a sudden we have a black president who says that statement, and it's sitting here in your book and it's in the epilogue. How does that make sense?
- [48:54]
B
Yeah, no, I mean, I think it's a problem that black empowerment programs and programs like OIC face from the beginning, when OIC actually originally gets, basically gets some of. The OAC is one of the, the biggest organizations to benefit from the war on poverty through government funding in the, in the 60s. And when it does part of the conditions of that, you know, contract and, and part of here what I, you know, what I, what I'm interested in the politics of black empowerment, right. Is the conditions placed on funding, right. The limitations, right. Of what is this process of incorporating, you know, these, these or community organizations, community, you know, programs into a larger apparatus of federal funding and corporate sponsorship. And part of the condition of that Funding is it can't actually explicitly be a black program. So OIC is largely remembered and does largely serve African Americans. But because they receive federal funding all the way in the 60s, they Sullivan launches OIC chapters in Appalachia serving poor white communities on an Indian reservation. Right. It has to become, because of the racial politics of the United States and because of, of right. The move that is made after the civil rights movement to, to move to a colorblind. Right. Kind of legal system. Right. To erase race. Right. This is the tension with kind of, you know, black and black empowerment is kind of capacious. Right. It does incorporate and does kind of have space for things like affirmative action, but when it comes to government funded, you know, programs, it was never, never a specifically black program. But, but I think in the 60s and 70s, again, because of, you know, we were talking earlier about, because of the movement of black power and the kind of, you know, bold, you know, proclaiming of the specific needs of black Americans and the specific anti black racism that is informing that moment. There is much more space for programs directly benefiting African Americans by the time we get to the 1990s. Right. That has, has been pushback. That has been. Right. Eroded through decades of right. Conservative, you know, politics pushing this idea of, of colorblind, you know, colorblind politics, you know, somewhat, kind of, slightly different version of that with the kind of multicultural politics of the 1990s where we, you know, celebrate everyone. Um, but by the time we get to Obama. Yeah, um, Obama is um, much less, you know, you know, someone would argue some much less able. Right. Or thinks he's less able to, to, you know, embrace that kind of, you know, that rhetoric than say, you know, had Jesse Jackson won the presidency, you know, in the 1980s, you know, kind of question. Although even Jesse Jackson, right, had to expand his coalition to be a rainbow coalition.
- [51:47]
C
Rainbow coalition, exactly.
- [51:49]
B
Yeah. But, but, but Obama I think does kind of embrace this, this, this kind of more colorblind, you know, sees himself sort of limited and constrained in, in that way. And, and yeah, so the kind, you know, I, I, I make the case and when I was originally starting this book, I, I very much, you know, thought that I was going to end with Obama. And, and I do kind of write in the epilogue, although I think we're in a different moment. You know, I think I thought myself, you know, ending in this moment where black empowerment still reigns. And I think we're, I don't think black empowerment politics still reigns in 2026, but I think he does still Kind of. Obama still does embody this kind of solution of, of entrepreneurship and kind of private market solutions to the problems of racial inequality. And he certainly does that with his policy towards, towards Africa. I, I mentioned a speech he gives in Kenya where he basically says that US Foreign policy towards Africa is going to be promoting African businesses. Right. This is how we, this is how we address entrenched racial inequality is through private enterprise and opportunity. But yeah, he, he is not, he doesn't, he doesn't link it directly to. It has to be a more capacious kind of. It's, it's opportunity for everyone. Right. It's, it's a much more colorblind vision by the time we get to Obama.
- [53:18]
C
So we have five, about five, six minutes left. And I always like to bring the book into current spaces. So here we are in 2026 and here we are facing the absolution of DEI. The marginalization was already marginalized, but the disappearance of marginalized voices, we don't exist in the American story. So if I was a layperson, non historical person, just a regular layperson, who is an activist, who is fighting in their communities, who is trying to push past this Trumpianism that's going on right now. And I go into Barnes and Noble and I see your book, and your book says Black Power, Inc. And I'm like, oh my gosh, that's what I'm looking for. How is this going to help me? What is she going to tell me? Where are the lessons learned from this book? So I'm a layperson and I see this title and I pick up this book and I'm so excited to read it. What do you want the layperson to gather information from this book? What lessons learned, how to protect their voice, how to produce a sustainable and viable activism within the 2026 climate that we're living in. How is this book going to help that person?
- [54:54]
B
Great question. You know, I think this book, there are no easy takeaway lessons. But when I began writing this book, I, I do take a kind of critical stance on black empowerment. Book Black empowerment, right. And we talked, we just talked about the, the failures of the empowerment zones, but also the failures of the Sullivan principles to eradicate apartheid. Right. I do not think that the answer to centuries of racial inequality is black empowerment. I think it's racial justice. I think it's reparations. I think it involves more direct state involvement. But I think one of the things that I learned reading this book, there's two important, lesser I think, particularly for activists. One and this is a real, I think a question that kind of emerged very early on in the research was activism does require material and financial investment, right? Movements need to be, people need to get paid, and that money needs to come from somewhere. And, and there are a lot of hard choices that I think organizations make and activists make about how do you, how do you finance? And, and I think, you know, one of the lessons, it's kind of a dual edged sword here is that I learned that organizations like oic, you know, these kind of black empowerment organizations were able to survive, you know, that a more, you know, they still were hurt by the austerity politics of the 70s and 80s, but they were able to survive by embracing a kind of more palatable, you know, by, by embracing corporations, by embracing corporate sponsorship, right? So, so kind of, you know, to, to evoke the Black Panthers survival pending revolution, right? That, that, and, and then the material lives of countless, you know, people who benefited from these job training programs, who benefited from getting a job, you know, in Coca Cola corporations, right? These, these programs matter. So that is, that is an important lesson. The other important lesson that I hope people will, will kind of take away, especially, you know, in the kind of middle parts of the book, thinking about how this movement then impacts corporate America is to say activism against and within the corporation does matter. There are noticeable shifts, including the emergence of dei. And, and I, you know, I think we can look at, and I think especially a few years ago in the conversations coming out of Black Lives Matter, right, There were a lot of criticisms of the limitations of kind of representational politics and of DEI in this kind of corporate, you know, washed way. But now that it's being, you know, pulled back, I think more and more people are recognizing that we lost something. And I think the thing that I want to kind of add here is that DEI came about as a result of activism, right? It was activists both outside of the corporation and within the corporation, people like Sullivan, that that made DEI possible. So corporations can be moved by politics at the same time, right? As I think we're seeing now, and I think is the ultimate lesson kind of to come away from this is that investing in a politics that is about, right, profit and about private enterprise as the kind of the key to black liberation is always ultimately going to end around, around profit, right? Keeping the money flowing. And, and, and I think historically we've seen time and time again that at the end of the day, kind of capitalism puts profits over people first. And so as a long term, as a, as a solution to the structural issues that we face. This is, this is not, not the way we're going to end apartheid, a continued kind of segregation and continued racial inequality. This can't be the only solution ever.
- [58:53]
C
So as an academic, I'm an academic, there are young people out here wanting to go to college, striving to go to college. They don't want job training programs, they want college. They want academic. As an academic, how do I contribute to black empowerment movement as you situated in your book?
- [59:18]
B
I mean, I think, you know, I think the role of academics, right, is exactly, I hope, you know, this is to kind of revisit this history and to highlight some of the complexities right, within the movements that we're talking about. To, to, to engage, right, a variety of different viewpoints and, and to problematize, to always critique, right, even critique our heroes, to even critique, right, those, those moments when we see successes happening. Right. Part of, I think the hat that academics, that intellectuals wear is to highlight the places where we can do better or do differently. I think for me, part of the limitations of black empowerment politics was a kind of a faith, like belief in a particular kind of program and a kind of narrowness in vision, not a narrowness in intention and not, you know, great ambitions, great intentions, but that, yeah, and so that takes a kind of critical thinking and it takes a kind of critical awareness that I think academics play a really vital role in keeping, keeping alive there. You know, some of some of the greatest activists are, were critics and academics who were constantly evolving in their thought, right? Just look at W.E. dubois, right? To kind of think about being able to self critique your own, your own vision and to be able to think about alternatives when one vision isn't producing the results you want it to. Which Sullivan, I should say, does, right? Sullivan, in the 1980s, with apartheid in the 1980s, when, when the state of emergency in South Africa is, is taking hold and South Africa is devolving into, you know, into chaos. Sullivan says black. You know, temporarily, for the moment, the Sullivan principles aren't working. And he actually advocates momentarily for divestment. And I think that kind of move shows great leadership and courage.
- [61:33]
C
I thought so too. I was very interested when he did that. Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I thought so too. Last words.
- [61:42]
B
Thank you. Go buy the book. Yeah, I mean, this is a book, I think that, you know, I, I hope will attract readers who are interested in black power and black empowerment and, and the complex relationship between them. So, yeah, I, I, I hope to hope to inspire people to, to go read it.
- [62:04]
C
Oh, thank you so much, Jessica. It was a. It was a pleasure talking with you. I hope our listeners enjoyed this conversation. It was very enlightenment. And I'm excited to see your future work. I'm very excited to see your future work. So for today, this is Bridget Wallace on New Books Network with Jessica Levy. Everybody have a blessed.