Activism
EARLY YEARS
As an undergraduate student at the University of Michigan at the beginning of the sixties, I became active in Voice, the Ann Arbor chapter of Students for a Democratic Society (“SDS”). I was involved in the peace and the civil rights movements of the sixties and seventies, participating in many demonstrations and related activities.
In New Haven, Connecticut, with leaders of the Northern Student Movement, I helped organize tenants’ rights groups. On the West Side of Chicago, I represented “The Hand”, a group which included the Conservative Vice Lords, the Egyptian Cobras, the Student Afro-American League, and The West Side Organization, in its acquisition of the first McDonalds franchise ever sold to a community group. In Little Rock, Arkansas where I taught at the predominantly Black Philander Smith College, I organized a demonstration, bitterly opposed by the Ku Klux Klan, against the use of the whip in the state prison system.
Board of Directors of Urban National Corporation
URBAN NATIONAL CORPORATION:
With partners from the Harvard Business School, I founded Urban National Corporation (“UNC”), the first purely private sector venture capital fund to invest in minority businesses. Initially I was UNC’s Assistant General Counsel (there was no General Counsel but I was too young and inexperienced to be given such a lofty title). I remained there for five years, ultimately joining my original founding partner in running the firm. In 1976, I initiated the transfer of control of UNC to a Black CEO and came to Wall Street to specialize in Mergers and Acquisitions.
ONGOING COMMITMENT
During my life as a financier and now as a writer/financier, I have continued to support organizations aimed at fostering civil rights, racial and distributive justice, and freedom of expression - work for which I was named the 2001 recipient of the New York Urban League Frederick Douglass Award. Organizations I’ve invested time, energy and money in are Cities in Schools, Global Kids, the Correctional Association of the State of New York, PEN America, The Brennan Center, and The Center for American Progress. In recent years, I’ve collaborated with the Bridgehampton Child Care & Recreation Center. In a program which has recurred every summer for the last seven years and counting, I interview thought leaders on the subject of race and racism in America.
Equality Matters
In a program which has recurred every summer for the last seven years and counting, I interview thought leaders on the subject of race and racism in America. These conversations form the Thinking Forward Lecture Series, presented annually by the Bridgehampton Childcare and Recreation Center.
