NEW YORK (AP) - More than a thousand prominent African-American leaders,
executives, entertainers and activists will head to Tanzania for a summit with
their African counterparts to help raise living standards on the world's poorest
continent.
Organizers said Monday that U.S. participants in the Sullivan Summit next
month will include executives from the Coca-Cola Co., General Electric, Chevron
Corp. and Procter and Gamble. Civil rights leader Jesse Jackson, comedian Chris
Tucker and professional basketball player Kelenna Azubuike also plan to attend.
"This is kind of a poor man's African Davos," said summit co-chairman Andrew
Young, referring to the annual economic forum in the Swiss mountain resort.
"It's a potpourri of ideas and projects and our efforts to respond to the needs
of Africa."
Young, a former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and mayor of Atlanta,
said the meeting will focus on topics ranging from climate change and energy
needs to jobs for young people, improving health care and coping with rising
food prices.
The June 2-6 gathering in Arusha, Tanzania will give American businesses "a
good sounding board as to what ideas and what products, and frankly what
countries, are most susceptible and ready for investment" in Africa, he added.
There are 4.5 million African-Americans whose ancestors came to the United
States during the slave trade and more than 5 million Africans who have come to
the U.S. since 1970 as students or political refugees, Young said.
Tanzania's U.N. Ambassador Augustine Mahiga called the summits serve as "a
bridge over the Atlantic, connecting Africa and the Americas -- a multipurpose
bridge ... (to) serve political, technical and economic ends."
"It is time to address the problems of poverty, ignorance and diseases with
the help of the Americans -- African-Americans who left the continent in
disarray, in chaos, as slaves -- and it is a time to rekindle the roots and the
bones of a common origin and a new era of solidarity," Mahiga said.
The summits began in 1991 and were the brainchild of Rev. Leon H. Sullivan,
a civil rights crusader who called for companies doing business in South Africa
to give opportunities to their black workers -- an initiative that helped end
apartheid.
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