Ep.129 – Harwell Wells on Civil-Rights Shareholder Activism

Harwell Wells, professor of law at Temple University, joins the Business Scholarship Podcast to discuss his article Shareholder Meetings and Freedom Rides: The Story of Peck v Greyhound. In this article, Wells recounts the efforts of Bayard Rustin and James Peck to use the proxy rules and their purchase of Greyhound shares to protest the bus company’s segregationist policies. These efforts were ultimately thwarted, Wells explains, by the SEC’s re-writing of the proxy rules to undermine civil-rights shareholder activism. This episode is hosted by Andrew Jennings, assistant professor at Brooklyn Law School, with editing by Daniel Hamilton, a third-year student at Brooklyn Law School.