Bringing a Civil Rights Movement Into the AI Economy

Here's What Happened

The National Action Network is one of the nation's leading civil rights organizations. Rev. Al Sharpton founded it in 1991, and 35 years later it has more than 100 chapters, a Saturday Action Rally in Harlem every week, and a voice that reaches the whole country through Rev. Sharpton's national television and radio shows. When he calls, pastors, mayors, and governors pick up.

In May 2026, he called me. Rev. Sharpton brought me in as Lead AI Fluency Strategist, with one assignment: build an AI literacy program for NAN and take it to the people: The National Action Network AI Initiative.

It was the second time he'd handed me a seat at NAN's table. In 1999, he asked me to run the Madison Avenue Initiative as Executive Director, bringing major consumer brands to the table with Black-owned firms. Twenty-seven years later, the table is AI. Same question: who gets a seat?

NAN brought the platform, the chapters, and the trust. I brought the strategy and built the program: market intelligence across 14 priority states, the curriculum, the partnerships, and the system that measured every room. I built it by listening to his Saturday Action Rallies and walking the March on Washington, so every session starts with the ground we stand on: voting rights, fair hiring, the digital divide. Then the tool.

The Challenge

We fought the same battle at the Madison Avenue Initiative. Back then, big brands wanted Black consumers' dollars and kept Black-owned firms out. Now it's AI. It's already in how people apply for jobs, start businesses, and get their news. And once again, our communities are being told to catch up to systems they didn't design.

Rev. Sharpton said it plainly in his op-ed: “AI is the new language of power, and NAN wants Black communities fluent in it. In Detroit, he put it this way. When the factory lines that drew Black workers north got automated, "not one person asked us what we thought about it." This time, NAN wanted a seat while AI is still being built.

Then there was the table itself. One of the world's leading frontier AI companies, the maker of one of the most widely used AI tools on the planet, stepped up as a partner. Its senior team sat down with Rev. Sharpton, and its experts reviewed every page of my curriculum for technical accuracy. NAN owns what was built for it, and the curriculum works with any AI tool. No one company can turn it off.

The Approach

I ran it like a national launch, not a speaking tour. Strategy first, then the build, then proof that it worked. Every city fed the next one.

  • Read the market first. Every city got its own intelligence brief before I built anything: the local economy, the issues hitting hardest, the resources people can actually reach.

  • Write the curriculum. I wrote NAN's AI fluency curriculum myself, for the communities NAN serves.

  • Keep it current. AI changes every week, so the curriculum does too. I update it as the tools, the rules, and the rooms change.

  • Build the partnerships. Chapters, churches, local governments, and community partners, lined up city by city.

  • Measure every room. Pre and post assessments in every city, and what they showed shaped the next one.

Campaign Success

  • More than 700 people in 10 cities between June and October: Newark, Philadelphia, Houston, Cleveland, Chicago, Tallahassee, New York, Atlanta, Nashville, and Detroit.

  • Entrepreneurs, small business owners, faith leaders, students, and city officials, with local governments opening their own doors to the program.

  • In every city that ran an exit survey, every person who answered said they would recommend the session to someone they know.

  • Phase two came out of those assessments: NAN AI Clubs, announced by Rev. Sharpton from the stage, plus train-the-trainer and live online sessions.

Why It Matters Now

In Harlem, Rev. Sharpton tied this work to 1969, when Rev. Jesse Jackson made him youth director of Operation Breadbasket in New York, a job about getting our people inside the economy instead of outside it. "Artificial intelligence is where that same fight lives now," he said.

I grew up on the corporate side of that same fight. My father was the executive making sure the commitments Operation PUSH won actually got kept. Now I'm inside this one.

The Madison Avenue Initiative. The CROWN Act. Tech & Talk. Now this. It's the same work I bring to companies: read the market, build for the people in the room, and measure what changes.

From the church hall to city hall. Your conference room could be next. Want to talk about what that looks like for your team?