Leon Sullivan: The Lion of Zion Who Fought Apartheid

At Zion Baptist Church on North Broad Street, the Reverend Dr. Leon Howard Sullivan led one of the most consequential civil rights campaigns of the twentieth century. For nearly four decades Sullivan pastored this congregation, and during that time he turned the church into an engine of economic justice.

His Selective Patronage Movement, launched in nineteen fifty-eight, organized Black consumers in Philadelphia to boycott companies that refused to hire Black workers in skilled and managerial positions. The campaign opened thousands of jobs nationwide. Sullivan went further, creating organizations that provided job training and education for minority communities, and he founded Opportunities Industrialization Centers, which spread to cities across the country and eventually to Africa. His Sullivan Principles, a code of conduct for companies operating in apartheid South Africa, became a cornerstone of the international campaign that pressured the South African government. He received the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Zion Baptist was where all of it began.