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The Opportunities Industrialization Centers (OIC) holds its eleventh annual convention in Atlanta.
1975 (Feb 4)
The Opportunities Industrialization Centers (OIC) held its eleventh annual convention in Atlanta, Georgia. The OIC, a Black self-help organization, was founded in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, by the Reverend Leon Howard Sullivan, the pastor of Philadelphia's Zion Baptist Church. Sullivan first received national attention in 1963 when, after increasing his church's membership from six hundred to five thousand, he established a day care center, a federal credit union, a community center, an employment agency, adult education reading classes, several athletic teams, choral groups, and a family counseling service. For these and other things, Sullivan was cited by Life magazine as one of one hundred outstanding young adults in the United States in 1963. During this same period he was named one of the ten outstanding young men of Philadelphia, won the city of Philadelphia Good Citizenship Award, the Silver Beaver Award of the Boy Scouts of America, the West Virginia State College Outstanding Alumnus Award, the Freedom Foundation Award, and the Russwurm Award. In 1964, at the age of forty-one, Sullivan established the first OIC in an abandoned jailhouse in Philadelphia. Starting with almost nothing, Sullivan built OIC into a $4.5 million per year enterprise that trained and found jobs for more than 200,000 people. A comparison of the OIC's expenditures with the number of people it had successfully trained over the previous ten years showed that the organization was able to put trainees through its programs at an average cost of only $1,500 each. Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare Caspar Weinberger stated that the OIC was more effective in training people and finding jobs for them than the vocational education programs in the nation's high schools. During the eleventh annual convention, President Gerald Ford addressed the delegates and praised the work and enthusiasm of Sullivan. The OIC head responded: “Mr. President, we are glad you came. It is time someone came to us to give the poor, and those who work with the poor, some encouragement and some hope. It is refreshing to know that now, at last somebody in the White House seems to care." Also on February 4, the OIC presented a State Government Award to Alabama Governor George Wallace. In presenting the honor, Connie Harper, the Black executive director of the Central Alabama OIC, kissed the handicapped former segregationist on the cheek. A week later, however, Tyrone Brooks, public information officer for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, resigned from the Board of Directors of the Atlanta OIC in protest of the award to Wallace. Brooks called the presentation "an insult to all of Black Atlanta and Black America.”
References:
- • Hornsby, Alton. Chronology of African-American History: Significant Events and People from 1619 to the Present. Detroit: Gale Research, 1995.