North Carolina’s NAACP leader The Rev. William Barber speaks at a news conference on Friday, Feb. 24, 2017, in Raleigh, N.C., while the national NAACP president Cornell Brooks looks on. The two were announcing the first steps in a national economic boycott of the state over conservative policies including a law limiting LGBT rights. (AP Photo/Jonathan Drew)
By A. Bruce Crawley
Philadelphia’s leading Black- and Hispanic-owned news media outlets, SCOOPUSA Media, the Philadelphia Sunday SUN, Al Dia, and “Dishing’s” daily audio podcast (DAP) have agreed to be key supporters of the two national game-changing, selective patronage -boycott campaigns that launched on February 28, 2025.
“Find founders who are Latino/Black who are going through the same experience as you are, and share,” said Mario Ruiz, the co-founder of Infinity Ventures. “Those founder stories you’ll realize are very similar. A lot of the walls you want to break through are similar.”
Once we absorb the data below, Blacks, Hispanics, and Asians in Philadelphia, and across the U.S., can more fully recognize the fundamental value, especially during politically stressful times, in working more diligently together to unify and strengthen our communities.
At the same time, fortified with this information, we can comfortably begin to focus more effectively on developing new relationships and additional mechanisms that will enable us to work more cooperatively across imagined racial and cultural lines. That would be finally the “gift from God” that our communities have long needed.
Indeed, those same false divisions have led us for far too many years, keeping our communities unnecessarily divided. They have also kept all of the country’s Black, Hispanic, and Asian communities from making productive use of their combined resources and brainpower, and from being able to maximize the resulting tangible benefits that should have always flowed into our family units and our neighborhoods.
Once we look closely at the comparative population and spending power data here, we can more readily understand why our political adversaries have been so invested in efforts to keep us apart from one another.
The numbers tell us among other things, that, with the power of our collective economic, political and populations resources, we can no longer allow ourselves to be simply dismissed as “minority” participants in U.S. Society, or its related, world-class economy.
How strong are we, really, in numbers?
Here in Philadelphia, as of 2022, the white community’s population percentage stands at 33.9%, and the combined Black, Hispanic, and Asian populations comprise the balance, at 66.1%.
Such population diversity is also occurring in most of the other urban centers across the U.S., wherein Black and/or Hispanic residents have become the largest population segments.
By way of example, the following specific listing from the U.S. Census Bureau includes a small but geographically representative selection of cities nationwide wherein the largest population segments, in addition to Philadelphia’s, now happen to be comprised of Black, Hispanic, or Asian persons:
Selected cities, nationwide, with the largest “Black alone” population segments:
Detroit, Michigan: 80.38%; Birmingham, Alabama: 69.82%; Beaumont, Texas: 49.15%; Newport News, Virginia: 46.35%; Rochester, New York: 44.55%; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: 42.01%.
Selected cities, nationwide, with large “Latino alone” population segments:
Laredo, Texas: 95.15%; Miami, Florida: 70.20%; Allentown, Pennsylvania: 54.22%; Los Angeles, California: 47.2%; Providence, Rhode Island: 43.90%; Chicago, Illinois: 29.6%.
Selected cities, nationwide, with large “Asian alone” population segments:
Honolulu, HI: 54.8%; Daly City, CA: 55.6%; Edison, New Jersey: 50.3; Enterprise, NV: 21.2%; St. Paul, Minnesota: 17.9%; Ashburn, Virginia: 21.6%*
*According to the U.S. Census Bureau, Ashburn is a suburb of Washington D.C. in Loudoun County.
We might even begin to think differently, and more confidently, about the roles we can play together in helping to produce positive changes across the nation, and on both sides of the political spectrum.
Malcolm X advised: “Once you change your philosophy, you change your attitude. And, once you change your attitude, it changes your behavior pattern — and then you’re ready to take constructive action.”
Since the second presidential inauguration of Donald J. Trump, on January 20, 2025, Black, Hispanic, and other historically marginalized U.S. communities, here in Philadelphia and across the country have been faced disproportionately with a steady stream of mean-spirited, family-destructive, life-threatening pressures, including presidential orders to eliminate Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) program commitments, in both the public and private sectors.
Among other things, executive orders have been issued by Trump, which have been designed to strip the Black, Hispanic, and Asian communities, who now represent more than 42% of the country’s population, and possess an annual consumer spending power of $5.3 trillion as of year-end 2024, of the ability to feed their families, to have the basic capacity to earn fair wages, establish their own businesses, and to have access to affordable healthcare.
Even as these disruptive, life-altering, guise of saving yet-undocumented “billions of dollars” of “waste and fraud,” have been made, we noticed that the recent Senate-approved national budget also includes a whopping $4.5 trillion in additional tax cuts for larger corporations and for the wealthy.
(By the way, that’s trillion with a “T”)
This is absolute government budgeting hypocrisy!
It’s also a challenge that we, in the long-economically marginalized communities, need to understand and address, given that so many organizations and leaders who we have depended upon to “save” us over the years have failed to do so at this critical time.
Please, stop me when I start lying).
That being the case, with our eyes now wide open, we must identify and harness, our real collective resources — such as our spending power— to generate the leverage we will need to return the federal government and the private sector to some semblance of fair and equitable economic and social policies.
In the case of the administration’s unrelenting efforts to demonize the concept of DEI, the country’s historically marginalized communities are being even more thoroughly excluded by these disdainful executive orders, which are intended to result in even higher levels and more exclusionary public and private sector workforce recruitment efforts.
Disappointingly, too many of us have watched helplessly as the doors of opportunity — with our government’s full support— have closed in our faces.
As a direct result of the Trump administration’s aggressive anti-DEI stances, Black, Hispanic, and Asian business owners will effectively be eliminated from participation in large public– and private-sector contract bidding opportunities. This would virtually eliminate the number of jobs those businesses have always created in their respective communities.
Notably, at the same time that anti-DEI postures have become pervasive across the us, many business and public-sector leaders continue to agree with findings in numerous national studies which have emphatically asserted that the inclusion of people of color, and women, in the nation’s business activities is not only morally appropriate, but it also carries significant potential for increased profitability, as compared to companies with less-inclusive business practices.
Specifically, studies produced by McKinsey & Company have found that companies with gender diversity on their executive teams show a 39% increased likelihood of financial outperformance.
Those same McKinsey studies uncovered evidence of a similar 39% better likelihood of financial outperformance among companies that recruited candidates who were people of color.
In addition, the esteemed Selig School of the University of Georgia has produced, for more than three decades now, its multicultural economy report, which has consistently demonstrated that “diversity, equity and inclusion” have proved to be critically important policies for ensuring morally appropriate business environments, and that such environments also contribute, importantly, to the production of more profitable business outcomes.
Question: What could possibly be printed on the pages of those reports that would justify Trump’s “economic advisors” support for even further exclusion in 2025 of qualified Black, Hispanic and Asian job applicants who would be drawn from that 42% segment of the country’s population?
Appallingly, the rapid pace of excessive, vengeful, regulatory impediments that the Trump administration wants to foist upon Black, Hispanic, and Asian communities, and on the majority of working Americans, has been historically unprecedented.
Sadly, far too many of us have felt isolated, powerless, and perhaps even worse, lacking in support from our elected representatives. Those emotions have contributed to a loss of confidence in our own ability to respond effectively to the administration’s chaotic, illegal, and hurtful processes.
Beginning on February 28, Peoples Union and the Latino Freeze Movement — with solid, unified national participation, and diligent support in Philadelphia from independent Black, Hispanic and Asian media outlets, are expected to be substantially effective in providing information to participating communities the coming year.
As Philadelphians we have a rich history of community-led initiatives that have driven significant change. As early as the late 1950s, grassroots Black community members in the city, engaged in a highly successful “selective patronage” campaign under the leadership of Rev. Leon Sullivan, pastor of Zion Baptist Church, with a powerful “Don’t buy where you can’t work” slogan.
Sullivan launched his “selective patronage” plan in 1958, after recruiting 400 other Black Philadelphia ministers to encourage their congregations (300,000 people) to boycott Philadelphia companies that did not agree to provide job opportunities to the city’s Black workers.
Over a four-year period, beginning in 1959, Philadelphia’s ministers led successful consumer boycotts against 29 companies, and by 1963, approximately 300 Philadelphia-area businesses had agreed to initiate fair employment practices that would, for the first time, include Black workers.
It should be noted that these actions all took place successfully, despite being afforded virtually no coverage at all from the city’s mainstream print or broadcast media outlets. The effort was highly successful, nevertheless, and received strong and united support from the grassroots community’s shoppers, from the city’s Black Church congregations and from Black print and broadcast media outlets.
With that history of success, we should be extremely confident that we should be able to bring our critical messages, and actions, forward to overcome the negative policies of the Trump administration and anti-DEI corporate interests for the benefit of Black, Hispanic and Asian communities, and for all Americans of conscience, in 2025.
Let’s get this done!
Disclaimer: The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed in the article belong solely to the author, and not necessarily to the author’s employer, The Philadelphia Sunday SUN, the author’s organization, committee or other group or individual.
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