Court Blocks Fearless Fund Grants to Black Women

On June 3, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the eleventh Circuit temporarily stopped the Fearless Fund, a grant program for girls, from awarding $20,000 grants exclusively to Black women-owned businesses while the lawsuit is pending.

“This is a devastating impact for the Fearless Fund and Foundation, and for the women in whom we have invested,” Arian Simone, CEO and co-founder of Fearless Fund, he said . “I am devastated by the plight of every girl of color who has a dream but grows up in a country determined not to give her the chance to fulfill that dream. On their behalf, we will turn pain into purpose and fight with all our strength.”

Despite the ruling, Simone confirmed that the Fearless Fund stays “open for business”.

“The message these judges sent today is that diversity should not exist in corporate America, in education, or anywhere else,” Simone added. “If it were really about exercising free speech with dollars – an American tradition as old as this nation itself – the results would be different. Instead, these judges bought what a small group of white men were selling. They defied the judgments of other defendant courts for similar reasons.”

The Supreme Court’s ruling supported conservative activist Edward Blum’s claim that the scholarship program could also be discriminatory. The ruling overturned a previous decision by a federal judge in September that found the lawsuit wouldn’t succeed on First Amendment grounds. The decision was a serious setback for the Atlanta-based Fearless Fund, which has sought to increase enterprise capital funding for Black women, and will impact similar race-based initiatives within the private sector.

The case is an element of a broader trend involving conservative activists like Blum, who’ve now turned their attention to the private sector after last 12 months’s landmark ruling banning college admissions based on race.

“Our nation’s civil rights laws do not allow for racial disparities because some groups are overrepresented in various endeavors, while others are underrepresented,” Blum said. “Programs that exclude certain people based on race, such as those designed and implemented by the Fearless Fund, are unfair and polarizing.”

While this decision does in a roundabout way impact employers, it has sparked a wave of legal challenges to DEI programs across the country, creating uncertainty amongst business leaders. Fearless Fund, a comparatively small player within the enterprise capital industry, was founded by Black women to support Black women, who received lower than 1% of the $215 billion in enterprise capital funding last 12 months.

The company has supported such well-known firms because the Slutty Vegan restaurant chain and the Live Tinted cosmetics brand.

Earlier, U.S. District Court Judge Thomas Thrash Jr., appointed by President Bill Clinton, ruled that the Fearless Fund grant program constituted a type of protected speech under the First Amendment. However, an eleventh Circuit panel, which incorporates two judges appointed by Donald Trump, disagreed with the choice.

“A preliminary injunction is appropriate because the Fearless Contest is unlikely to benefit from First Amendment protections and causes irreparable harm,” the judges said.

Alphonso David, president and CEO of the Global Black Economic Forum and an attorney representing the Fearless Fund, said that “this is the first court decision in the more than 150-year history of post-Civil War civil rights law that has halted private charitable support to any racial or racial group.” ethnic.

“The dissenting judge, the district court and other courts agree that these claims should not prevail,” he added. “This is not a result, but a preliminary ruling without a full presentation of the facts.”