To mark the fifth anniversary of George Floyd’s murder, hundreds gathered outside Target’s Conyers location at the behest of prominent local pastor Jamal Bryant.
Bryant led protesters in a 9 minute and 29 second prayer, the same amount of time former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin had his knee on Floyd’s neck, killing him in 2020.
The pastor of New Birth Missionary Baptist Church has been a vocal leader in the nationwide Target boycott that began in response to the company’s announcement earlier this year that they would be rolling back DEI initiatives at the behest of the current White House administration.
“Target should be in shame. Five years ago, they made a pledge to the Black community and walked away from it and thought that there would be no consequence and repercussion,” Bryant told his congregation on Sunday.
Just days earlier, The Wall Street Journal reported that Target CEO Brian Cornell admitted to employees that the boycotts had “played a role in our first quarter performance” on the company’s quarterly earnings call. Quarterly sales have dropped to $23.85 billion, a 2.8% decline from the first quarter last year.
Cornell told employees that the 3.8% sales decline in stores open more than one year was due to “five consecutive months of declining consumer confidence, uncertainty regarding the impact of potential tariffs, and the reaction to the updates we shared on [DEI initiatives] in January.”
Although Bryant is not the only Black pastor advocating for the boycott, New Birth, which has an estimated 10,000 members, has been the driving force of the movement in metro Atlanta.
Easter weekend, Bryant hosted the first Bullseye Black Market in his megachurch’s gymnasium for boycott participants to shop with local Black business owners in a central location. He later announced plans to expand the market to 20 cities to mark Juneteenth.
While Target was not the first, nor the only, company to announce DEI rollbacks this year, the company has had a long-standing reputation for being a progressive workplace. Target implemented its diversity policies long before the summer of 2020. The company also began celebrating Black History Month and recognizing LGBT employees as a minority group in the early 1990s.
In the summer of 2020, Cornell told CNBC that he was shaken by Floyd’s murder, which happened just miles from the Minneapolis-based company’s headquarters.
“That could have been one of my Target team members,” he said at the time.
What began as a 40-day Target fast has expanded to an indefinite boycott until the company’s leaders agree to four demands put forth by Bryant: honor the $2 billion pledge to the Black business community, deposit $250 million across 23 Black-owned banks, establish community retail centers at 10 HBCUs, and fully recommit to diversity, equity and inclusion at every level of the company.
