Black Agenda must be economics says billionaire Peebles

6th October 2014   ·   0 Comments

By Burney Simpson
Contributing Writer

(Special from The NorthStar News & Analysis) – America and African Americans would be better off focusing on economics and jobs rather than the killing in August of Michael Brown, argues R. Donahue Peebles, the African-American billionaire and chairman and CEO of The Peebles Corp., a privately held real estate development firm.

Black leadership has expended too much political capital reacting to the shooting of Brown by a Ferguson, Mo., police officer, says Peebles, and they’ve forgotten the underlying cause of the death.

“Our problem is economic,” he says. “We have to get parents jobs, and get young people exposed to business and jobs. Young Black men don’t believe they have a chance at the American dream.”

It’s hard to disagree when you consider that African-American median household net worth in 2011 was $6,314 compared with $110,500 for whites.

Peebles said that can change by using Black political capital to convince state and municipal pension funds to invest in Black-owned firms and other companies that support the Black community with jobs and investments.

“It builds economic opportunity when governments invest in minority- and women-owned firms,” he said. For that matter, the big pension funds need to hire and promote more minorities to manage the funds. “We don’t have an equal opportunity society. … I’m talking about equal access to opportunity.”

With no opportunity, the reality is more young Black men will be murdered, he says.

But he does know business. Since its 1983 founding in Wash­ington, D.C., Peebles Corp. now has a $5 billion portfolio of buildings in New York, Philadel­phia, Miami and Miami Beach, San Francisco, Las Vegas, and Washington.

Peebles Corp. regularly hires and works with minority- and women-owned firms on its projects, whether they be investors, architects, or contractors, says Peebles.

Peebles, who likes to be called Don, speaks his mind without the filter of $1,000-an-hour attorneys, and last week walked the crowded convention halls of the 44th Annual Legislative Conference of the Congressional Black Caucus without a slew of off-duty-cop bodyguards. After participating in a panel discussion Peebles spent an hour shaking hands and getting selfies taken with everyone that stood in line to give him a pitch, catch up, and exchange cards.

Peebles hangs with the one percent too. For instance, the panel on economic opportunities included Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), Rep. Yvette Clark (D-NY), Derek Dingle, editor of Black Enterprise, and Janice Bryant Howroyd, CEO of Act*1 Group, a human re­sources firm with more than 13,000 clients worldwide, including many of the Fortune 500.

Peebles, vice chairman of the board of the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation, is an important Democratic Party fundraiser, and weighed running for mayor of Washington in 2010 but stepped back when his mother-in-law was diagnosed with breast cancer. He has several political options, with a home in Florida, home town Washington, and he spends considerable time in New York for business.

For now, though, Peebles says, “My goal is changing the discussion.”

This article originally published in the October 6, 2014 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.