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‘Black Capitalism’ Promised a Better City for Everyone. What Happened?
This whole news article is a good read I only quote some part of it .
This whole news article is a good read I only quote some part of it .
‘We wanted a factory’
When the head of Xerox, Joseph Wilson, drove up to the headquarters of the organization in 1964, the Rev. Franklin Florence remembers there was still smoke in the air from the protests erupting around Rochester over the lack of affordable housing for Black people.
The F.I.G.H.T. organization was an umbrella group made up of Black churches, tenant associations and even book clubs that used their collective strength to organize protests around any issue affecting the membership.
Many of Rochester’s corporate leaders were shaken by the protests, but it was Mr. Wilson who took the step in 1964 of reaching out to Mr. Florence, the head of F.I.G.H.T. — short for Freedom, Independence, God, Honor, Today — to ask how Xerox could help.
“Joseph Wilson asked what we wanted,” Mr. Florence recalled in an interview. “We told him we wanted a factory.”
Mr. Florence had gained national attention during the civil rights movement with his campaign against Eastman Kodak, the city’s largest and most influential company, which had employed relatively few Black residents.
He was a polarizing figure in Rochester who led protests at Kodak’s annual shareholder meeting, an embarrassment to the powerful corporation and a warning to other corporations about the power of social activism to disrupt their businesses.
Eltrex’s original factory building was torn down a decade ago after a vehicle smashed into the first floor and burst into flames.
A photo of the Rev. Franklin Florence at Central Church of Christ. He gained national attention in the early days of the civil rights movement with his campaign against Eastman Kodak.
Mr. Wilson of Xerox assigned one of his executives in Europe to set up the plant. The company that would run it would be called Fighton.
Some of Fighton’s first products were vacuums and parts for electrical transformers. A portion of the company was owned by the employees and the rest by the F.I.G.H.T. organization which ran a neighborhood housing project called F.I.G.H.T. Village, near the factory. Xerox lent managers to help train the workers.
Among the efforts to support Black business amid the unrest of the 1960s, Fighton represented something new.
“They wanted to try capitalism, but they wanted it to happen in a socialist way,’’ said Laura Warren Hill, a history professor at Bloomfield College in New Jersey, and the author of “Strike the Hammer: The Black Freedom Struggle in Rochester, New York, 1940-1970.” “They wanted it to have a human face and to help the underserved.”
The role of the city’s big corporations in this initiative also stood out.
“You have Xerox working with a Black power group,” Ms. Hill said, “to shape what Black capitalism is going to look like.”
Matt Augustine, Eltrex’s longest-serving chief executive, said his approach to hiring was to give employees first and often “second chances.”
Changing leadership and a name
Outside Rochester, though, Fighton was not always so well received. The name seemed to be a big part of its problem.
“The people we were trying to do business with would ask: ‘What does this Fight mean? Fight who?’” recalled Matthew Augustine, the company’s longest-serving chief executive.
In 1976, Mr. Augustine was recruited to become C.E.O. by a friend from Harvard Business School who was on the board of Fighton.
The F.I.G.H.T. organization had gone through an internal power struggle, with Mr. Florence eventually losing his leadership role. At the time, the factory was not profitable and in danger of shutting down, Mr. Augustine said.
The Fighton board wanted Mr. Augustine, a native of Louisiana, to shift the business model to be “more personal profit orientated” and less focused on the community benefit, he said.
Residents of F.I.G.H.T. Village, a housing project near where the old Eltrex factory stood.
The board agreed to give Mr. Augustine ownership of most of the company, and he eventually amassed an 80 percent stake.
One of his first moves was changing the company’s name from Fighton, which was seen as too militant in the business community, to Eltrex Industries — a mash-up of Electrical, Transformer and Xerox.
In addition to manufacturing, the rebranded company started selling office supplies and offering snow removal and mail processing services. Under Mr. Augustine’s watch, Eltrex was meant to be a one-stop shop for companies seeking to fulfill their minority-owned business goals.
Mr. Augustine said his approach to hiring was to give many employees first and often “second chances.” Some workers were still incarcerated and came to and from the factory from jail each day.
Rochester had other Black-owned businesses but many tended to be restaurants, barbershops and other service-focused enterprises. At its height, Eltrex employed 350 people, mostly Black and Hispanic workers, in “prideful jobs” Mr. Augustine said. It generated $20 million in sales and was profitable.
Kodak, which had been initially reluctant to get involved because of its contentious relationship with the F.I.G.H.T. organization, also agreed to do business with Eltrex, Mr. Augustine said.
Despite its financial success, Mr. Florence’s son Clifford Florence said Eltrex was straying from its original mission.
“They lost sight of the advocacy that they should be doing for the poor and began to look at the money,” he said.
Mr. Jackson went to work at Eltrex in the late 1980s. He got the opportunity to supervise employees and to work in sales, where he made valuable connections. He looked enviously at Mr. Augustine’s office, his Mercedes and house in the suburbs. “That’s what inspired me to start my own business,” Mr. Jackson said.
In 1993, Mr. Jackson left Eltrex to start Panther Graphics. One of his biggest accounts came from Xerox. In a few years, Mr. Jackson also had a house in the suburbs and a cabin on Lake Ontario with a pontoon boat.
Several years ago, Mr. Jackson drove his Porsche to visit a friend in north Rochester and handed him cash to buy them beer. A few minutes later, the police surrounded Mr. Jackson and his sports car. An officer threatened to search him, suggesting that the cash was for a drug deal. The police eventually left, he said, but did not apologize for their mistake.
“I am not going to cry about it because what good does that do?” Mr. Jackson said.
‘I bit my tongue more than I wish’
In her memoir published in June, Ms. Burns describes how the very top executives at Xerox and the longtime board member Vernon Jordan mentored her throughout her career. She praised Mr. Wilson, who is credited with founding Xerox, for taking an “enlightened” approach to diversity.
Some community leaders say the Eltrex company and its corporate sponsors veered from their mission by focusing on profit and deliberately shedding its Black activist identity.
“Why is it that we have none of these people working here?” Mr. Wilson said, according to Ms. Burns’s book. Mr. Wilson remarked that he could not run a “great company” where Black people and women he saw outside his window were “literally not here.”
While Mr. Wilson and other executives set a supportive tone at the top, these efforts by Xerox and the city’s other large companies did not always change attitudes across the broader Rochester community, some local leaders say. Ms. Burns, who is retired from Xerox, declined to comment.
Eltrex was regularly recognized with awards for the quality of its products. Yet, Mr. Augustine would hear rumblings from people in the local business community about the need to improve quality control at Eltrex.
Eltrex was also paying a higher interest rate than other companies — something Mr. Augustine learned after he was appointed to the board of a local bank.
“People ask, ‘Why weren’t you a billion-dollar company?’” said Mr. Augustine. “But they don’t understand the environment we were operating in.”
“When you hear about the folks burning down Black Wall Street. This stuff is real. There are people who are absolutely threatened by any kinds of success for Black people, and they work to keep you from being successful.”
Dennis Bassett spent 50 years in corporate America, including at Kodak and Bausch + Lomb. He wishes the companies would have done more to help the city.
Dennis Bassett spent 18 years at Kodak and 17 at Bausch + Lomb. He remembers flying with a top Kodak executive on the corporate jet, talking about the need for more diversity. Kodak “did a good job putting people of color in executive positions,” Mr. Bassett said.
But those hiring initiatives did not always reach down into the company’s middle management, where many key decisions were made, he said.
And even as Xerox and Kodak “were printing money,” the city’s poorest Black residents continued to slide further into poverty, he said. Mr. Bassett faults himself for not pushing the companies to do more to help the city.
“Back then, I was chasing the brass ring,” said Mr. Bassett, 73. “I was doing the things I needed to be successful for my career and my family.
“I look back and say I bit my tongue more than I wish I had bit my tongue,” he added.
In a statement, a Xerox spokesperson said the company has spent millions over many decades supporting science programs for Rochester students and organizing mentorships and other volunteer activities to “help close the poverty gap.”
“Giving back to communities throughout the world, particularly underserved communities, is ingrained in our company’s values,” the spokesperson said.
Kodak did not respond to requests for comment.
Mr. Bassett faced some barriers in Rochester that seemed intractable.
Mr. Bassett remembers that when he put his five-bedroom house in an upscale Rochester suburb on the market in the 1980s, the realtor recommended that he take down all the family pictures or any artwork that could indicate that a Black family lived there.
“The realtor was matter-of-fact,” Mr. Bassett said. “And guess what? We complied. I just wanted to sell my house.”
Clifford Florence, a minister at Central Church of Christ in Rochester, has been trying to get Plymouth Avenue, on which his church resides, named after his father, the Rev. Franklin Florence.
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