Editing Leon Sullivan (section)

== Philadelphia Ministry ==

Leon Howard Sullivan was born on October 16, 1922, in Charleston, West Virginia, his ministerial training at Union Theological Seminary and Columbia University preparing him for the Philadelphia pastorate that would become his life's work. His 1950 appointment to Zion Baptist Church in North Philadelphia began the ministry that would transform both congregation and community. The church's location in one of the city's poorest Black neighborhoods provided both challenge and opportunity for the economic development initiatives he would pioneer.<ref name="massie">{{cite book |last=Massie |first=Robert Kinloch |title=Loosing the Bonds: The United States and South Africa in the Apartheid Years |year=1997 |publisher=Doubleday |location=New York}}</ref>

His early Philadelphia activism included the "Selective Patronage" campaigns of the late 1950s and early 1960s, which organized boycotts of companies that discriminated in employment. The campaigns' success in forcing major employers to hire Black workers demonstrated that economic pressure could achieve results that moral appeals alone had not accomplished. His understanding that employment discrimination perpetuated poverty informed the job training programs he would subsequently develop.<ref name="sullivan"/>

His 1964 establishment of the Opportunities Industrialization Centers created the job training model that would spread throughout the nation and eventually worldwide. OIC's approach—combining vocational training with life skills education, building self-esteem alongside employment capabilities—addressed the barriers that kept poor Philadelphians from economic advancement. The program's success in placing trainees in employment, and its replication in dozens of cities, demonstrated that his Philadelphia model could achieve national scale.<ref name="massie"/>