A pastor called off a Target boycott. Then the backlash began.
A pastor called off a Target boycott. Then the backlash began.
Jessica Guynn and Betty Lin-Fisher, USA TODAY Wed, March 18, 2026 at 5:46 PM UTC
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When Atlanta pastor Jamal Harrison Bryant called off his yearlong Target fast, the announcement set off fireworks.
At a hastily convened news conference in front of Target’s Minneapolis headquarters on March 11, grassroots activists denounced Bryant and told the world the nationwide boycott over the company’s rollback of diversity, equity and inclusion was not his to end. Target shoppers – especially Black women – mobbed his Instagram page to say he didn’t speak for them.
Two days later on his podcast “Let’s Be Clear,” Bryant conceded he “misread the room.”
“I was reading from a different sheet of music,” he said. “I wanted to apologize to you for being a leader that was out of touch with what it is that the community…were demanding.”
Atlanta pastor Jamal Harrison Bryant in Washington, D.C. on August 28, 2020
When Target scrapped its DEI policies shortly after President Donald Trump took office, boycotts sprang up across the country. From church pulpits to community gatherings, the policy U-turn was widely viewed as a betrayal of Black Americans who had propped up the retail giant's fortunes.
The national uproar mostly died down until this new controversy put the Target boycott back in the public bullseye.
Minneapolis civil rights activist and lawyer Nekima Levy Armstrong, founder of the Racial Justice Network, launched a boycott in February 2025 with Monique Cullars-Doty, cofounder of Black Lives Matter Minnesota and Jaylani Hussein, executive director of CAIR-Minnesota.
Armstrong told USA TODAY that Black shoppers would not return to Target until it reverses course on DEI.
“Target’s refusal to restore DEI commitments makes it clear: The company is willing to lose Black consumers and women – many already gone – in order to appease its MAGA customer base,” Armstrong said. “Target made a conscious choice to align with the Trump Administration. We the people made a conscious choice to take our dollars elsewhere.”
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Former Ohio State Senator Nina Turner said her organization We Are Somebody, which called for a nationwide boycott the day after Target announced it was rolling back its DEI programs, was not letting up either.
"In the last meeting between organizers and Target leadership, corporate leadership was hostile towards the very idea of diversity, equity and inclusion,” Turner told USA TODAY. “While Pastor Bryant will be stepping away from our efforts, we plan not only to continue the boycott but also to escalate our actions to hold corporations accountable."
Former Ohio State Senator Nina TurnerFor Target shoppers, boycott is personal
Shoppers who haven’t set foot in a Target store for more than a year took to social media to make those feelings clear.
“Black women said we not going to that goddamn store,” Jina Meadows, 45, a digital creator from Atlanta who encourages people to read more, said on her Instagram account. “You can revamp, revive, renew, we not going back.”
Meadows used to shop at Target two to three times a week because the company made her feel seen with ads featuring Black people and culture and by stocking products for and by Black people.
Atlanta digital creator Jina Meadows
Whether scouting for actress Tabitha Brown collaborations or a blender, she’d pop into Target just to see what was new. A date even took her to Target so they could get to know each other while strolling the aisles. “It was one of the best dates I have ever been on,” she said. But now the guy is history and so is Target, she said.
The Black community is not a monolith and plenty of Black people still shop at Target, but those angry over its DEI capitulation are “never going back,” Meadows said. “We don’t need an apology. We don’t need HBCU initiatives. We are done. It’s dead.”
‘They don’t care about us’
Like Meadows, Karen Jones, a 56-year-old retired employee of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and a longtime RedCard-toting shopper from Severn, Maryland, once relied on Target for everything.
Karen Jones
It was her one-stop shop for Christmas and Easter and her go-to no matter where she was living or what was happening in her life – even when her oldest daughter was murdered last year.
“It was the most devastating thing I have ever gone through,” she told USA TODAY. “It sounds like a small thing but, when I went to get something to wear for her memorial service, I went to Target. It was the first place I thought to go.”
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Jones said she has not been back since the shift in Target’s DEI policy and she has no plans to return to her old shopping haunt. Target, she said, has not earned her trust or her wallet.
“Having them make the decisions that they made since this new administration has come in, it has been very hurtful, just very hurtful,” Jones said. “We are just not a community that is going to go and throw money at a company that does not care about us. And I feel they don’t care about us.”
A Target shopping cart is seen in front of a store logo in Azusa, California on November 16, 2017.
Target declined to comment. In a prior statement to USA TODAY, Target said it was "more committed than ever to creating growth and opportunity for all.”
“We will continue showing up as trusted neighbors while delivering results for our team members, guests and the more than 2,000 communities in which we serve," the company said in the statement. "Because when those communities thrive, so do we."
From DEI cheerleader to backpedaler
Target was once one of the loudest corporate supporters of Black America. It devoted shelf space to and touted collaborations with Black businesses. It showed up at the Essence Festival of Culture, an annual celebration of Black culture.
Racial justice emerged as an even higher priority after the 2020 killing of George Floyd a few miles from its headquarters. The company pledged to increase the number of Black employees across the company by 20% and committed to spending more than $2 billion with Black-owned businesses by the end of 2025.
But when Trump issued executive orders aimed at eliminating “illegal DEI” in the federal government and the private sector, Target joined the stampede from DEI commitments.
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Major corporations jettisoned DEI programs to avoid inviting scrutiny from the White House. Diversity goals to boost the Black workforce were tabled. Supplier diversity programs were rebranded and no longer considered race or gender.
Target said at the time it was staying in step with “the evolving external landscape.” But the backpedaling put the company in a tricky position.
For years it had been beloved as “Tar-zhay” and profited from its close association with Black communities and Black-owned brands. Now church pastors and community activists had joined arms across the country against it.
DEI is just one of Target’s troubles
It wasn't Target's first time in the cultural crosshairs. When groups opposing DEI launched boycotts in recent years over “woke” culture, Target responded by scaling back Pride month merchandise which angered LGBTQ+ customers.
Growing pressure from activists on both sides is one of the top challenges facing Michael Fiddelke who took over as CEO in August, according to David Primo, professor of political science and business administration at the University of Rochester in New York.
Target has reported 13 straight quarters of sluggish sales. Company officials have admitted that shopper anger has contributed.
“Target remains a battleground for activists on the left and the right and its new CEO hasn’t yet figured out how to extricate the company from this role,” Primo said. “Fiddelke already faces a huge challenge in turning around a company with significant operational issues. This certainly doesn’t help matters.”
Target CEO Michael Fiddelke in March 2025 when he was the company's chief operating officer
Fiddelke recently laid out a $6 billion turnaround plan that calls for new investments in stores, workers and technology. He's also slashed prices on more than 3,000 products.
“The reality is that while the boycotts do have something of a financial impact on Target, they are not the primary cause of the chain’s sales slump. That decline set in long before DEI was an issue and it is driven by poor execution, especially in stores, around things like pricing, service and out of stocks,” said Neil Saunders, managing director of GlobalData Retail. “That said, the boycotts are unhelpful and they create a lot of negative noise.”
That negative noise came up in a recent interview Fiddelke gave the Wall Street Journal in which he acknowledged that Target has not been “clear enough about who we are.”
Paul Argenti, a professor of corporate communication at Dartmouth's Tuck School of Business, said Target needs to be a lot clearer and more credible with customers.
“Stakeholders are testing whether Target’s actions, messaging and values are aligned over time,” Argenti said. “In these moments, companies have three choices: recalibrate strategy, reinforce their position with clear rationale or retreat. The worst outcome is ambiguity, where actions and messaging don’t clearly signal which path they’ve chosen.”
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Target boycott reignites after pastor calls off DEI fast
Source: “AOL Breaking”
