Leon Sullivan

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 anti-Apartheid activist.

Sullivan died of leukemia in a Scottsdale, Arizona hospital at the age of 78.

Born to Charles and Helen Sullivan in Charleston, West Virginia, he was raised in a small house on a dirt alley called Washington Court--one of Charleston's poorest communities.

His parents divorced when he was three years old and he grew up an only child.

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."

As a teenager, Sullivan — who as an adult stood 6 ft 5 in tall — attended Garnet High School, a school for African Americans in Charleston, West Virginia.

He received both a basketball and a football scholarship to West Virginia State College where, in 1940, he was initiated into the Tau chapter of Kappa Alpha Psi fraternity.

A foot injury that ended his athletic career and scholarships forced Sullivan to pay for the remainder of his college by working in a steel mill.

Sullivan became a Baptist minister in West Virginia at the age of 18.

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.

He believed that jobs were the key to improving African American lives.

In 1943, Adam Clayton Powell, a noted black minister, visited West Virginia and convinced Sullivan to move to New York City where the latter attended the Union Theological Seminary (1943–45) and later Columbia University (Master's in Religion 1947).

He also served as Powell's assistant minister at the Abyssinian Baptist Church.

During this period, Sullivan met his wife Grace, a woman whom he referred to as "Amazing Grace."

The couple would eventually have three children, Hope, Julie and Howard.

One of Sullivan's greater achievements during his time in New York was the recruitment of a hundred colored men for the police force in Harlem with Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia's support and encouragement.

In 1945 Leon and Grace Sullivan moved to South Orange, New Jersey where Sullivan became pastor at the First Baptist Church.

Five years later, the two moved to Philadelphia and Leon took on the role of pastor at the Zion Baptist Church.

There, he became famously known as "the Lion of Zion".

In 1958, he asked Philadelphia's largest companies to interview young blacks, and only two companies responded positively.

Then, in collaboration with other ministers, Sullivan organized a boycott of various businesses which he referred to as "Selective Patronage."

The slogan was "Don't buy where you don't work" and the boycott was extremely effective since blacks constituted about 20% of Philadelphia's population.

Sullivan estimated the boycott produced thousands of jobs for African Americans in a period of four years.

The New York Times featured the program with a front-page story, and later, Fortune magazine brought the program to greater public attention on a national scale.

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.

In 1964, 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, 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 affiliated programs in thirty states and the District of Columbia, OIC has grown into a movement, which has served over two million disadvantaged and under-skilled people.

The exchange led to SCLC's economic arm, Operation Breadbasket, in 1967, headed by Jesse Jackson.

Sullivan's work was built on the principle of "self-help," which provided people with the tools to overcome barriers of poverty and oppression on their own.

African-Americans had been excluded from training for better paying jobs.

Sullivan realized that simply making jobs available was not enough and said,

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

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.