After a months-long boycott of Target over the rollback of DEI initiatives, Pastor Jamal Bryant now calls for a boycott of another major retailer.
The pastor of New Birth Missionary Baptist Church revealed exclusively to USA Today that he is calling for an electronic boycott of Dollar General, saying that the company had “walked away from DEI.”
“Target is canceled since they have betrayed and walked away from our community, and we’ve gone on from there,” Bryant said. “We’re done with Target, and then our next focus will be around Dollar General.”
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Details Of The Boycott
Unlike the Target boycotts, Bryant is not calling for his congregation to stop shopping at the store because “a lot of our family members in rural communities are at the hands of Dollar General because of food deserts that bring a whole other conversation.”
Instead, Bryant is calling for a massive campaign consisting of mass telephone calls, emails, and the use of social media to pressure Dollar General to reinstate its DEI initiatives.
“Like other corporations, Dollar General has bowed to pressure from the Trump administration and rolled back their diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives,” Bryant said. “Dollar General also needs to be held accountable for failing to invest in the very Black and low-income communities that make up the backbone of their customer base. This isn’t just a corporate retreat − it’s a betrayal of the people they profit from.”
Bryant’s group is calling for the retailer to restore and strengthen DEI infrastructure, create a community reinvestment fund, expand contracts to Black-owned vendors, and address systemic racism within the company.
The new boycott follows a long-standing boycott of Target stores, which was prompted by its decision to roll back DEI initiatives. On May 25, New Birth and more than 50 other Black churches around the country organized peaceful protests outside Target stores to coincide with the 5th anniversary of George Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis. The effort was a continuation of a “Target Fast” to pressure the Minnesota-based retailer to reinstate the DEI initiatives it launched following Floyd’s death.
Since that boycott began, Newsweek reports a 3 percent drop in Target’s sales compared to the first quarter of last year. CEO Brian Cornell admits that the drop is due to “ongoing pressure in our discretionary business, plus five consecutive months of declining consumer confidence, tariff uncertainty and the reaction to the updates we shared on belonging in January.”