Leslie Odom Jr. | Family Issue 2019

THE LARGEST BLACK-OWNED BANK TEAMS UP WITH
BMe COMMUNITY
- TO CLOSE THE RACIAL WEALTH GAP -
BY: ERIC K. THOMAS
The Banker is a film that tells the story of one of the first Black banks in America in
the 1950-60s. Over fifty years later, OneUnited Bank is the largest Black-owned bank
in America and recently they announced BankBlack X, a nationwide plan to close the
racial wealth gap. The goal of BankBlack X is to galvanize the community to share the
truth about Black people and money and make financial literacy a core value of the Black
community. One of the partners of this campaign is BMe Community. We had the opportunity
to speak with their CEO/Co-founder Trabian Shorters to learn more about the
non-profit, their partnership with OneUnited Bank and how they make black men aware
of their excellence!
WHAT IS BME COMMUNITY AND WHY WAS IT
CREATED?
We’re a network of black leaders who have committed ourselves
to making society better for black people. We work in non-profit
land, finance and government. We created BMe Community
when I was vice president of the John S. and James L. Knight
Foundation, which is a National Foundation headquartered in
Miami.
HOW DID THE PARTNERSHIP WITH ONEUNIT-
ED BANK COME ABOUT?
OneUnited is the largest Black-owned bank in the country. The
nonprofit came about independent of OneUnited Bank and
within a couple of years, we overlapped and realized that our
work around building stronger black communities and their
work around building black wealth and also strong black communities
totally overlapped. It was very simple for us to make
the decision to deposit with OneUnited. Unlike Wells Fargo or
Bank of America or any of these other banks, the majority of
OneUnited’s lending is to us and for us, whereas those other
banks you might get 1% of their loan portfolio having anything to
do with us and they often look upon us as fee generators, not as
people whose prosperity they’re trying to grow. But OneUnited
in contrast, of course, looks at growing black wealth and closing
the loan gap so it made perfect sense for us to deposit with them.
WHAT DOES THAT PARTNERSHIP LOOK LIKE?
We partnered with them about three years ago because
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