Pastor Sees Boycott of Target Stores as New Civil Rights Fight

Pastor Jamal Harrison Bryant is midway through a fervent sermon at his New Birth Missionary Baptist Church outside of Atlanta. Thousands of his flock are on their feet in the stadium-sized chapel as he strides back and forth across the stage in a light blue suit, his voice rising and falling. He alternates between conversation and condemnation, shifting between references to Shakespeare and Alcoholics Anonymous.

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He repeats the challenge over and over, admonishing worshipers to break the habits that lead to debt, broken marriages, drugs or drinking. Then he turns to perhaps his biggest battle, an uphill, four-month-old fight to get Black consumers to break their habit of shopping at Target.

Bryant, 54, is demanding Target Corp. recant on its January decision to shift long-standing commitments to diversity, equity and inclusion. He and his supporters have singled out Target because of its historic support of the Black community and Black-owned brands. The outcome is key for both the Black church and the broader civil rights movement, he says.

While he wasn’t the first to call for a Target boycott, the fight has taken on an existential nature for Bryant and others in the Black church who are desperate to force a company to defy US President Donald Trump’s war on what Trump calls “illegal DEI.”

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The decline in the Black church attendance, which has been integral to the modern Civil Rights movement for three quarters of a century, is another challenge. Less than a third of Black people said they attend services weekly last year, according to a Pew Research Center survey online and by mail. That compares with more than half attending weekly, according to a telephone survey from 2007. Younger Black churchgoers are also less likely to attend a historically Black church. With fewer people in the pews, the message doesn’t reach as far as it used to.

Bryant says a boycott is one way to energize those younger churchgoers that remain, and a successful one might help keep the church relevant.

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Target has acknowledged the boycott contributed to a decline in first-quarter sales. And in April, Cornell met with Bryant and the pastor’s long-time mentor, Reverend Al Sharpton, for what Bryant describes as an amicable conversation that didn’t lead to any breakthroughs. He’s looking for an admission that the company was wrong to turn its back on DEI and hopes the ongoing boycott will be a drag on back-to-school sales, as students across the South begin to return this month. Target shares have fallen around a third this year.

“We will break Target,” he says. “We will break any company that doesn’t honor our dignity while they are trying to take our dollar.”

A national action against Target wasn’t initially Bryant’s goal. After seeing calls for a boycott from activists in Minneapolis, where the retailer is based, Bryant talked to church leaders in New York City, Chicago, Dallas, Houston and Washington D.C. about a limited boycott among their congregations. It would begin on Ash Wednesday and end on Easter — a 40-day Lenten fast from Target purchases.

The group had four demands. It asked Target to fulfill a commitment made in 2021 to invest $2 billion in Black businesses by the end of this year; make deposits of $250 million into 23 Black-owned banks; establish 10 retail training centers at historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs); and reverse the company’s January decision to end some DEI commitments.

Target says it will complete the $2 billion investment in Black-owned businesses, nearly doubling the number of Black-owned brands on store shelves and will complete a $100 million investment in Black-led community organizations. The company also says it is “supporting thousands of students at more than 20 HBCUs.”

In the January announcement, Target said it would conclude its three-year DEI goals and won’t set them publicly going forward. These goals had been set on a rolling basis for nearly a decade. It also reconfigured a supplier diversity program into a “supplier engagement” team.

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The campaign is a test for Bryant and whether he can build the Target protest into a full movement, says Valerie Cooper, an associate professor who studies the Black church at Duke Divinity School, where Bryant earned a Master of Divinity. The Black community has closely tracked the boycott so far, she says, not the least because the broader anti-Trump movement in the US is in disarray.

“There really isn’t much else out here,” Cooper says. “Many African Americans are reticent to participate in marches now, after having watched Whites re-elect Trump. The boycott is something that Black people are doing for Black people, by Black people alone.”

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