Leon Sullivan

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

Life

The African American Leon Sullivan came from a poor family. He attended the Garnet High School for blacks in his hometown of Charleston and received a 1939 basketball and football scholarship to West Virginia State College. After a foot injury, he was forced to earn the tuition fees by working in a steel mill itself. Sullivan then moved to the Union Theological Seminary in New York City. During this time he worked as an assistant pastor at the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem. His active participation in the civil rights movement began in the early 1940s. Sullivan helped a march on Washington, DC to organize. He moved to Philadelphia in 1950, where he took over the management of the Zion Baptist Church. He was a popular preacher whose congregation grew rapidly. Sullivan was convinced that jobs were crucial to improving the lives of African Americans. He organized a boycott of large companies in Philadelphia that were not ready to invite young African American to job interviews. The boycotts were successful and Martin Luther King invited Sullivan in the early 1960s a to organize a similar boycott in Atlanta. Sullivan also created a training center for African-Americans, the Opportunities Industrialization Center (OIC ), and a start-up initiative for businesses of African Americans, the Zion Investment Association ( ZIA ).

In the 1970s, Leon Sullivan turned to the anti -apartheid movement. It was established in 1971 to use as the first African American member of the board of General Motors and tried the economic power of the company to exert influence on the government of South Africa. He published in 1977 the Sullivan Principles, a code of conduct for American companies active in South Africa, which included detailed measures on anti-discrimination. In the 1980s, Sullivan was a co-organizer of the global boycott, where companies ended their activities in South Africa. In 1988 he went as pastor of Zion Baptist Church in retirement. With Adamou Moumouni Djermakoye, the Ambassador of Niger in the United States, he organized the first African- African American Summit in Ivory Coast. The bi -annual event is a discussion forum dedicated to the improvement of living conditions in sub-Saharan Africa through economic development, debt relief, industrialization, education and health. 1992 Sullivan was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. After the election of Nelson Mandela in 1994 he strove to attracting foreign companies in South Africa. He left with experts from politics and economy, the Sullivan Principles to develop the Global Sullivan Principles of Corporate Social Responsibility, which were presented by Kofi Annan in 1999. This was around the world actionable ethical guidelines for multinational enterprises whose goals are the promotion of human rights, social justice and economic fairness. In the United States, around one hundred companies to the Global Sullivan Principles of Corporate Social Responsibility committed.

Writings

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