GM CEO Mary Barra to meet with Black media owners

Barra has said she wants GM to be the most inclusive company in the world and she started an Inclusion advisory board last year, around the Black Lives Matter protests, to prove it.

“We have increased our planned spending with both diverse-owned and diverse-dedicated media across our family of brands,” Morrissey said on Sunday. He did not provides specifics.

The ad was signed by the heads of seven Black-owned media companies including Allen, rapper and actor Ice Cube, who co-founded pro-basketball league BIG3, TV and film production company Cubevision, and Contract with Black America (CWBA), which he started with the goal of initiating dialogues about racism.

Byron Allen, head of Allen Media Group. (Photo: Courtesy of Allen Media Group)

Also signing the ad is former NBA player Ulysses “Junior” Bridgeman, who bought Ebony Media last year after bidding $14 million for it in U.S. Bankruptcy Court and Don Jackson, founder, chairman and CEO of Central City Productions, a Chicago-based  television production company.

This isn’t Allen’s first time at the rodeo. The one-time comedian and host of the 1980s NBC hit “Real People” founded Entertainment Studios in 1993. He has grown his empire to include a film division and about two dozen television stations, including the Weather Channel.

As of this year, Allen has a net worth of $400 million dollars, according to wealthygenius.com website.

Along the way, Allen has grown to be a crusader of civil rights taking on what he says is systemic racism in corporate America, often with inflammatory rhetoric and lawsuits.

Joining Allen, Ice Cube, Junior Bridgeman and Don Jackson on the full-page ad is also:

• Roland Martin: CEO of Nu Vision Media, Inc., a Chicago-based company that produces and distributes Roland S. Martin’s daily digital show, #RolandMartinUnfiltered.
• Todd F. Brown, PMP: Founder, Urban Edge Networks and HBCU League Pass, which covers historically Black colleges and universities.
• Earl “Butch” Graves Jr.: President and CEO, Black Enterprise,  a magazine covering African-American businesses.

‘Ad not necessary’

Allen said the men who signed Sunday’s full-page ad have known each other for years. For the past five years, they have been reaching out to Barra asking for a meeting, Barra does not respond, he said in Sunday’s interview.

About two weeks ago, the group sent an email again to Barra. This time Wahl responded indicating she would meet with them instead, Allen said.

That was the last straw for the group, Allen said, prompting them to compose the ad. The ad said the group has no interest in meeting with Wahl, who was McDonald’s CMO from 2015 to 2018 and, “severely neglected, minimized and discriminated against” Black-owned media companies during her time in that job. 

Barra’s refusal to acknowledge Black-owned media companies, the ad said, is the “very definition of systemic racism” because “you don’t have true economic inclusion.”

The Black-owned media group wants GM to allocate at least 5% of its ad budget to Black-owned media companies, said Allen Sunday.

But the ad says “less than 0.5% goes to media companies owned” by African Americans, calling that “horrendous, considering that we as African Americans make up approximately 14% of the population in America and we spend billions buying your vehicles.”

Morrissey disputed the figure saying GM spends more than .5% of its media budget now with Black-owned media. 

“It is actually 2% and we’re committed to growing it,” Morrissey said. “We are moving forward with that.”

Morrissey declined to provide Barra’s reaction to the full-page ad calling her racist and he did not want to characterize the aftermath of it.

“We were already in discussions with them and willing to have the meeting, we just wanted to have the preliminary discussions first, so the ad was not necessary to prompt the meeting,” Morrissey said. “We want to move forward and be constructive.”