The Sullivan Principles: Corporate Conscience and the Fall of Apartheid
How a Black Preacher's Code Challenged Global Business

About this book:

In 1977, a six-foot-five Baptist preacher from Philadelphia walked into the boardrooms of America's most powerful corporations and demanded they choose: dismantle apartheid from the inside, or face the consequences. Leon Sullivan—GM's first Black director, architect of the legendary Philadelphia boycotts, and founder of the job-training empire OIC—issued a six-point code that forced multinational giants to desegregate factories, equalize pay, and promote Black workers in defiance of South African law. What began as a radical experiment among twelve companies became the world's first corporate human rights mandate, igniting a global movement that rewrote the rules of capitalism.

*The Sullivan Principles* takes you inside the high-stakes collision of morality and money. Drawing on boardroom transcripts, secret correspondence, and the voices of South African workers who lived the code's promise and its betrayals, this book reveals how Sullivan's strategy walked a razor's edge—hailed by some as a liberation tool, denounced by others as a fig leaf for complicity. When incremental reform hit the hard wall of Pretoria's intransigence, Sullivan didn't blink: he ordered total corporate withdrawal, helping trigger the economic strangulation that brought the apartheid regime to its knees.

At a moment when businesses again face demands to confront authoritarianism, labor exploitation, and climate crisis, Sullivan's story is the origin story of corporate conscience itself. This is the untold history of how a Black preacher from the civil rights movement turned the profit motive into a weapon for justice—and why the fight he waged in the 1970s is the fight every CEO, investor, and citizen is fighting today.