Atlanta area pastor leading a boycott of Target over the company’s scuttling of its diversity, equity and inclusion programs says the campaign will continue under the new chief executive officer.
Target announced this week its current CEO, Brian Cornell, will step down early next year and will transition to Executive Chair of the Board of Directors. While the Board unanimously elected Target’s current Chief Operating Officer Michael Fiddelke to succeed Cornell.
Activist, author and former political candidate Jamal Bryant, the head of New Birth Missionary Baptist Church in DeKalb County, GA, and leader of a Target boycott campaign says the change in leadership doesn’t matter. The boycott will continue.
“I think we’re looking at the moving of peanut shells in Central Park,” Bryant said during an interview with host Kate Bolduan on CNN. “It’s really nothing different about the ideology or their stance on DEI. It’s really smoke and mirrors.”
“I am anxious and zealous to see if the new CEO will be open to a meeting so that we can discuss what are the four things that we’re asking for, but just moving the COO to the CEO is really stylish, but it has no substance,” Bryant added.
Bryant says Black people in the U.S. spend upwards of $12 million a day and that the demands remain the same: Target must honor its commitment to invest $2 billion in Black communities, deposit $250 million in Black banks, partner with six HBCUs and reimagine DEI programs however they want.
But so far Target has not responded, and the ongoing boycott has hurt the giant retailer’s bottom line. Sales and store traffic has dropped since the store cancelled many of its DEI policies in January after President Donald Trump took office and pushed to remove diversity programs from the federal government and corporate America.
In store traffic in July was down 3.8% and has trended down each month since January, the business news site Capital B reported.
Although the Minneapolis-based retailer reported net sales of just over $25 billion in the second quarter of 2025, up 2% from the first quarter, that was actually down 1% year-over-year, according to the company’s earnings report.
Cornell acknowledged in an earnings call with investors in May that the boycott was having an impact on the store sales, but that Americans’ worries over continuing high prices, Trump’s whipsawing tariffs and broader concerns about the state of the economy were also a factor in slowing sales.
“While we believe each of these factors played a role in our first quarter performance, we can’t reliably estimate the impact of each one separately,” Cornell told investors and industry analysts during an earnings call in May, according to Yahoo Finance.
Bryant says the boycott will continue and that he has some advice for the new CEO.
“I would say to him that it pays to give dignity where people are giving dollars, is that what we’re looking for is not a favor, but to do business.”
In the caption of his Instagram post with the CNN clip, Bryant reminded his audience that everything isn’t as it seems.
“Hey family ….Don’t blow ballons and throw confetti just yet ! @target is playing in our face. They moved the CEO to chair of the board . It’s rewarding bad behavior. I look forward to meeting with the new head to see if there is a new commitment to our community. God didn’t bring us this far just to come this far!”
So far, 350,000 people have signed Bryant’s petition to boycott Target.
Great Job Shelby E. & the Team @ Atlanta Black Star Source link for sharing this story.
