REVEREND ROBERT JEFFREY
INTERVIEWED BY BILL LYONS
Residents of Southeast Seattle spend $110.8 million a year while local businesses only sell $87.5 million worth of goods and services. This means that over $23 million of local capital is leaking out of the community each year, and with it the capacity to control how it is invested, the jobs it can create, and the community empowerment it can underwrite. Everyone is talking about strengthening local communities. But what are communities doing? Reverend Robert Jeffrey, with the support of 20 local ministers, Mayor Norm Rice, the Reverend Jesse Jackson and over 1200 individual stakeholders so far, believes that communities must create community controlled financial institutions. In this interview, Reverend Jeffrey explains how this effort, called Campaign 5000, can be a cornerstone of long-term community building in Southeast Seattle.
What is Campaign 5000?
Campaign 5000 is a part of our understanding of Black Economics. Black Economics is based on three principles. One is the principle of self-help. Communities must begin to develop strategies to help themselves, to create a job base, an economic base, a business base, that can support the infrastructure of those communities. And the self-help method we have chosen is to have businesses that are responsible to the communities, and consumers that are responsible to the businesses that are responsible to the communities.
The second principle is the principle of developing the infrastructure of a community. The first level of infrastructure that will help keep the money in the community is business infrastructure. We have to develop the kinds of businesses that will reinvest in the community and that will keep the money circulating in the community. The second infrastructure that keeps money in the community is financial institutions that owe their existence and their perpetuation to the community itself. The financial institutions that we want to create are community-controlled development banks. The model of Campaign 5000 is about getting community people to create an endowment fund which is controlled by stakeholders of that community. Those people will always be stakeholders in the control of that endowment fund. And the interest off the endowment fund fuels a revolving loan fund and eventually a development bank. The revolving loan fund would provide money for three kinds of businesses: existing businesses within that community that are being locked out of venture capital loans; start-up businesses; and businesses that want to create jobs for inner city youth. That would create an infrastructure. That financial institution would be locked into the community in a way that makes sure that it seeks to preserve the dignity and the integrity of that community.
The third principle on which we base our sense of community-based economics, Black Economics, is the principle of reinvestment. People who relate to the community from outside the community must ultimately be held responsible for how they reinvest money they make off the community. That money should be tracked. Once you have financial institutions that service these local communities, then it will be easier to track how money goes out. Many of the community-servicing corporations in this country, the retail industry and all of these industries, would suffer drastically if you took that kind of money out of circulation. I think that these industries and these corporations feel little or no responsibility to help maintain these people that are keeping them going. I think that's something that has to stop and we have to really address that issue of reinvestment. So that's a part of the third principle. The way we do that in the Black Dollar Days Task Force is that we target companies through our campaign. Each year we vote in terms of responsibility or irresponsibility, and give out what we call the Bull Connor award.
Why the Bull Connor Award?
The Bull Connor name comes from the struggle in Birmingham. Bull Connor was the chief of police. The people in Birmingham were trying to integrate the lunch counters and the chief of police used water hoses and dogs to prevent the integration process through intimidation and fear. We believe that corporate America in many instances uses similar tactics of intimidation in terms of job loss, the destruction of unions, the blacklisting of employees who raise Cain, the blacklisting of organizations like ours that seek to press for proper and adequate reinvestment policies. They use their power, the power of the dollar, in the same way that Bull Connor used the force of the water to keep people from claiming and maintaining their rights. We believe that this is an economic struggle, a class struggle, and that corporate America is as stubborn and resistant to their obligation to reinvest as Bull Connor was resistant to the obligation of the leadership of Birmingham to allow people equal access to public facilities.
How will a community-based financial institution treat businesses differently?
They treat the businesses in relationship to how the businesses are helping develop the community. The primary safeguard for that is that the endowment fund will consist of stakeholders, who are non-profit people, who will put money into the endowment fund for the sole purpose of having a stake in the development of the community. They are people who own the endowment fund. Whoever gives to the endowment fund understands that there is no return on their money and no matter how much you give you only have one vote as a stakeholder. You can't buy fifty votes with fifty million dollars. That's to protect the community. You gradually build up the wealth and power of the community.... What we are doing is creating an alternative way to do things that is more people oriented than the way things are being done now. In the immediate future it is going to assist in creating more jobs for African-Americans and more businesses and a greater infrastructure in the African-American community, and also in the near future for another way to do welfare in the inner cities. Which I think is an important contribution.
Is this a new type of gradualism?
Gradualism has to do with who is in control of the process. The issue for Martin Luther King was whether or not the white liberals in the South were going to be in control of the process. The process had to be controlled by the people who were themselves the victims. Otherwise it would be gradualism, because the people outside the victimization would not feel the imperative, the right-now necessity, to deal with the issues. Campaign 5000 is radical. It is talking about control. It is talking about immediate control, not down the road control. The moment you have an endowment fund controlled by stakeholders who are vested in the community you have immediate control of a financial institution. We have to create a system that hits the ground with immediate control. And with a way to maintain that immediate control.
How does this effort relate to the recent development in Southeast Seattle?
Any development that is not controlled by the people who are indigenous to that area is a very dangerous development. One of the things that happened in South Central Los Angeles after the Rodney King verdict was we saw a whole area that had been developed in the past 25 years go up in flames. It went up in flames because that development was not done by the people who are indigenous to that area. So they didn't feel any connection to it. It was stores placed there for them, but most of the profits went outside the community. Until we start making economic development a matter of increasing the self-sufficiency of local communities then we are going to run the risk of having, not just inner city blight, but having inner city riots. We're making the same mistake here. We're bringing in development that promises nothing but jobs. None of it is owned by African-Americans. The issue for them is that they are providing services for the community. Well, that's good. But the issue for us is that they are not bringing self-dignity and self-sufficiency. I think the future security of this country rests on the citizens of this country having a certain amount of dignity and self-sufficiency.... The African-American community wants more from these corporations than just jobs. We want them to reinvest in this community in a substantial way, in a visible way.
And Campaign 5000 will help your community achieve this?
Campaign 5000 is an initial attempt to create structures that create pressure. And create not just pressure, but create capacity, and create avenues through which this kind of thing can be done.
How does this effort relate to other things happening in Seattle politics?
We have yet to define the role for big city departments in Campaign 5000. I think it will be easier once we get the 1.5 million dollars for people to discover how they plug in. It's not that the city made this happen. It's just the city plugging into community.
You mentioned the riots in Los Angeles. Is Community Policing an opportunity or an obstacle to the creation of the community infrastructure envisioned by Campaign 5000?
Community Policing that is controlled by the downtown establishment is not Community Policing....That's a semblance of Community Policing. They can call it Community Policing if they want to, if it makes them feel good, but the bottom line is that it's still government control of communities. That's still government police forces, government agents coming into the community to spy on people within the community.... The reason we cannot address that is that we don't have the means to talk about communities having their own people protect themselves and having their own means by which they can talk about hiring police chiefs for the village, who are answerable to the people within that village or within that community.... It's a good notion, but it does not exist anywhere in America. I would hope that one day it would exist, but I don't think it exists in Seattle. I think what we have in Seattle is a continuation of the same thing, just under the guise of Community Policing, which is even more dangerous, because it says the police are more sensitive than they used to be and that's just not true.
A city council elected by district?
I think that a city council controlled by districts is better than what we have now. We need more community representation on the city council....People say that fractionalizes the city, well what is wrong with that? That might create a little confusion downtown, but I think we need some confusion downtown.
The urban villages plan?
We are talking about creating a financial infrastructure for the urban villages that will ultimately give the control of that village to the local constituents. This is complimentary rather than anti-urban villages. Obviously we believe in the power of communities to control their own destiny.
How can readers of the Free Press help?
What we need right now is friendly lists of people who agree with some of these aims and objectives that I am talking about and who want to help us create this model. We need friendly lists and we need people to come in and help us call those friendly lists. They can call Terry at 323-0534. (FAX: 323-4701)
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Contents on this page were published in the October/November, 1994 edition of the Washington Free
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