Jesse Jackson Urges Wall Street Investors To Put More Resources Into Inner-City, Minority Communities

Jet, August 3, 1998

Rev. Jesse Jackson recently told Wall Street investors that it makes no sense to overlook the $600 billion in annual spending power within the U.S.'s inner-city and rural communities.

"What have been looked at as poverty zones really are markets. And yet they have not been seen as strategic and as valuable as they are," Jackson told institutional investors, such as pension fund managers, during a "Trillion Dollar Roundtable" business forum he hosted in New York along with Travelers Group CEO Sanford Weill.

Jackson, president of the Rainbow/ PUSH Coalition, argued that investors should pay as much attention to the potential of the impoverished inner-city and rural communities as they do to volatile foreign emerging markets.

The one-day conference attracted some 150 business, government and labor leaders who actually control more than $2 trillion in private equity capital and pension funds. It was the first New York meeting since Jackson's Rainbow/PUSH Coalition teamed up with many of Wall Street's most prominent leaders last year.

The Trillion-Dollar Roundtable is an outgrowth of the Wall Street Project that was launched by the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition in January. Last year Rainbow/PUSH also opened an office at 40 Wall Street that is aimed at getting more minorities hired and promoted, named to boards and awarded more business.

Among the Roundtable participants were John Smith, chairman, CEO and President of General Motors Corp., Maceo K. Sloan, CEO and chairman of the Sloan Financial Group Inc., Leland C. Brendsel, chairman and CEO of Freddie Mac, Frank Raines, chairman and CEO-designate of Fannie Mae, and Richard Trumka, secretary-treasurer of the AFL-CIO.