As BLACK ENTERPRISE unveils the 2014 BE Registry of Corporate Directors — the annual list of African American board members that can be found on S&P 250 companies—our editors found that roughly 30% of the largest publicly traded companies do not have a single African American among its governance. And the most egregious offenders—Silicon Valley tech companies—are not powered for diversity.
Over the past few months, Rainbow PUSH Coalition Founder and President Jesse Jackson has taken aim at Apple, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, and the like, buying stock in these companies and pressing top management in annual meetings and sit-downs. In other words, he’s applying good, old-fashioned shareholder activism.
RELATED: Black Enterprise’s Exclusive Registry of African American Board Members
In his exclusive interview with our Tech Editor Patrick Austin, Jackson shares why this battle for African American board representation is so critical and being waged in Silicon Valley.
Black Enterprise: Share with us your campaign concerning corporate boards in Silicon Valley.
Rev. Jesse Jackson: First of all Silicon Valley has been a highly segregated valley. This includes Apple, eBay, and Amazon, all of them. All of them are all-white, male boards of directors, and a few white women for the most part. And the board of directors was one issue. The other was the C-suite issue.
We found that they had been fighting vigorously against EEO reports because their records had been so horrendous, until they were embarrassed by the numbers. And Google broke the ice, now Yahoo is coming in. We think that exposing the EEO reports opens the door to the whole discussion about boards of directors.
For example, now, the successor to Bill Gates as Microsoft board chairman is John Thompson, who ran Symantec very well. And I think that Dave Drummond from Google is now on one of the major boards. Once we had begun to open up the discussion, they felt the media pressure of exposure.
Find out more about Jackson’s efforts to hold companies accountable for diversity on corporate boards on the next page …
We met with HP [Hewelett Packard], and again all of them at first resisted EEO reports until Google broke the ice, now they’re coming in slowly on that. But we have miles to go, We met with Verizon who had the $50 billion debt offering with $300 million in fees for financial services, there were no black, no Latino, no women who got any of those financial
services. There are two blacks on the board. So we need to deal with the board level, the C-suites level and then advertising and marketing and lawyers and funding for apps and codes … the whole thing. If there’s one black guy on the board, his power is fairly limited, and his role is not to be a watchdog, it’s to be a participant. We become the outside force that puts pressure on these companies to open up.How have you been lobbying tech companies to encourage them to increase diversity among C -suite and board members?
We bought shares of stock in the companies. So we have the right to go to the shareholders meeting. That’s always a very sensitive meeting because they’re trying to protect what they’ve done, and their image, and that’s when Bloomberg and BLACK ENTERPRISE and CNBC, the critical economic journalists, are there, on that occasion. When we go to the floor, that’s the time when the shareholders always have the right to go look and raise concerns. That, to them, is a very sensitive moment.
RELATED: Black Enterprise’s Exclusive Registry of African American Board Members
The shareholders meeting platform cannot be ignored. In other words, just like in politics, I consider
we spend more than our numbers and vote less than our numbers, you know? And what strikes me about these companies is that we first ask, “What is your black or brown user base?†and they’re very reluctant to share that information because it’s embarrassing. In these various companies, black and brown consumers are like 40% of the market. It’s an embarrassing gap, because the institutional lockout has been so great for so long.Should black board members be watchdogs?
For the most part, blacks on boards do not see themselves as freedom fighters. They play by the rules of the board, and also want to present themselves as honorable and trustworthy. You take a guy like [Ariel Investments CEO] John Rogers tends to be more of a rebel type on boards. [The late Rev.] Leon Sullivan was giving the [General Motors] board demands for more black dealerships, more blacks on this and that, and South Africa policy. It’s hard to conceive of a black plan not rooted in those companies.
If they’re not advocates for social justice and advocates to expand the market, it’s a job. Unless they use those positions to expand the market, [use] their presence to create sensitivity, that’s a basis for them being relevant.
How can entrepreneurs who aren’t directly involved in the tech space affect any sort of change. Should we encourage support for businesses that support blacks or black shareholders, black board members?
First of all, it’s a myth about being in tech. For example, we went to a shareholders meeting at Facebook … Donald Graham is on the board and he’s not tech. Erskine Bowles, who used to be at the White House … these aren’t high tech guys. Some 60% of people in Silicon Valley are not tech at all. These are friends or prestigious people.
We do have consumer pressure to apply. We do have image pressure to apply … and we have talent. We represent market, money, talent, and location. We’re not just the price of doing business, we’re value-added. That’s why blacks on the board should make the case that we are not the cost of doing business. We represent underserved communities, underserved, ignored talent, and locked out capital. As they expand around the world, we have more to offer here than most of the countries around the world they’re expanding into. To them, Black America is a Third World market.