“A Hope And A Prayer Won't Be Enough”

The Black Economic Alliance, a fledgling political action committee, is putting its money behind candidates dedicated to righting economic imbalances that affect African Americans

- Jordyn Holman

MORE THAN A HALF-CENTURY after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was enacted and Shirley Chisholm became the first black woman elected to Congress, African American households still have half the income of white families. Sure, black unemployment is close to a record low, as President Donald Trump points out. But it’s still almost twice as high as the jobless rate for whites. The wealth gap is wide: Black families with bachelor’s degrees or higher have a net worth of about $68,000, about one-sixth that of white households with similar educations.

So for one group of black executives, the message was clear: The wealth we’ve accrued comes with the power—and responsibility—to enact change.

It started small, as these things do: free tickets for black teens to see the movies Selma or Hidden Figures; a personal donation to assist disadvantaged students pursuing engineering degrees. Then the 2016 election replaced Barack Obama with Trump, who spent years spreading the false claim that the first black president wasn’t a natural-born U.S. citizen.

Priorities changed in Washington. The group of executives raised their sights. In 2017 they created the Black Economic Alliance, which, by their reckoning, is the nation’s only political action committee founded by black business leaders and specifically dedicated to the economic issues—wealth, wages, work—that affect black Americans.

That focus on business and economic issues differentiates the BEA from other PACs led by or for African Americans. So does the business experience, and wealth, of its leaders. “We got to the point in our careers where we can take risks,” says co-Chair Charles Phillips, who earned $43.3 million in 2017 after a subsidiary of Koch Industries Inc. completed a more than $2 billion investment in his software company, Infor Inc.