Opinion: Black power in the boardroom is leading the fight for justice

Editor’s Note: Peniel E. Joseph is the Barbara Jordan chair in ethics and political values and the founding director of the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin, where he is also a professor of history. CNN — Black business leaders’ efforts to stop voter suppression in the wake of Georgia’s recently enacted voting bill illustrate the vanishing separation between protest and politics in America today. They also embody the work of Georgia’s most famous civil rights activist, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Peniel Joseph Kelvin Ma/Tufts University Over 70 Black executives, led by former American Express CEO Ken Chenault, signed a letter released at the end of March that pressed corporate America to take a stand on voting rights, one of the central moral and political issues in the United States today. “Memo to Corporate America: The Fierce Urgency of Now,” which debuted as a full-page ad in The New York Times, channels Dr. King’s words from his April 4, 1967, Riverside Church Speech criticizing the Vietnam War to uphold the sanctity of voting rights in America. But former Time Warner CEO Dick Parsons, one of the signers of the letter and a self-described lifelong Rockefeller Republican, insisted to CNN that the law is “just a baldfaced attempt to prevent or suppress the number of Black voters who show up to vote in Georgia.” From a historical perspective, Georgia’s voter suppression effort represents an especially painful reminder of the precarious nature of racial progress in America.