Operation HOPE Founder and CEO John Hope Bryant will faciltiate a special presentation of American Black Journal entitled, “Creating Prosperity in Communities of Color.” The one-hour broadcast will explore a number of issues, including gender and class, wealth inequality, and forms of wealth.
During the one-hour program Bryant will cover a lot of ground, from President Abraham Lincoln’s Freedman’s Bank, signed into law March 3rd, 1865 and chartered to ‘teach freed slaves about money,’ to the role of abolitionists and businessman Frederick Douglass in subsequently running the bank, investing $10,000 of his own money (roughly $20 million in today’s dollars). Last month, at the request and encouragement of Bryant, U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Jack Lew took the extraordinary and historic step of formally renaming the former U.S. Treasury Annex Building, which sits within the White House 18 acre complex, into the Freedman’s Bank Building.
The program will cover the work of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Rev. Andrew Young (today, HOPE Global Spokesman Ambassador Andrew Young) and other civil rights leaders in 1968, with the Poor People’s Campaign, through the work of Rev. Leon Sullivan to forge economic ties for Black America with corporate America, and later with Africa, in the 1970’s. The program will bring the audience right up to our current ‘state of things,’ so to speak, in Black America specifically, and more America generally.
Bryant will lay out his vision of and for what he calls a “Silver Rights Movement,” which builds on the successes and foundation of the Civil Rights Movement. More so, what important organizations such as the National Urban League and others, are doing to make a different today.
He will also answer the question, directly, ‘why we have a Ferguson, MO, today,’ and its connection with our long, partially forgotten (financial and economic) history.
Finally, he and expert panelists will ‘point us’ forward, towards a practical, rational and achievable aspirational future for us all, building on our strong legacy of self-reliance, and the unfinished business of the Freedman’s Bank.
Bryant will discuss the vision for the growth of underserved communities, which he outlined in his now bestselling book, “How The Poor Can Save Capitalism: Rebuilding the Path to the Middle Class. The Solution for the 100%,” and what Operation HOPE is doing on the ground in cities like Detroit, MI, with its Project 5117 portfolio of empowerment programs, tools and services, and his vision for what he calls his Detroit Uplift 2020 plan.
Expert panel members will also discuss critical topics incluiding personal budgeting and financial planning, home ownership, investing, and generating wealth. One special guest during the one hour program will be national media personality and thinker, Roland Martin.
Join us Wednesday, February 24, 2016 at 7:30 p.m. on WTVS – Detroit Public Television.
Watch the live stream here, or for those local to the area, live on television at PBS Detroit.