How to Be an Anti-Racist Bank

Next City
Thursday, July 2, 2020

Darrin Williams was already out sick for a few days — not Coronavirus-related — when Minneapolis police officers killed George Floyd. Williams, who is Black, has a 21-year-old son and a 20-year-old daughter. “Every Black parent has to have that conversation about the police with their kids,” he says. He is also the CEO of Southern Bancorp, a bank with $1.5 billion in assets, serving small cities and rural areas of Arkansas and the Mississippi Delta region. Banks didn’t create systemic racism by themselves, and they won’t solve it by themselves. But banks have played an important role in creating and sustaining systemic racism, and Williams still believes they can play a role in ending it.