My gratuitous Don Imus post

"The civil rights movement for your generation is economic."

Those words were said to me by Nathan A. Chapman, the man who started the country's first, and thus far only black-controlled, publicly-traded investment bank, only weeks before I got my first job as a business reporter. It was seven years ago, five years before Nate's company spectacularly crumbled, before Nate himself was charged, tried, convicted and sentenced to a seven-year stretch in a white-collar scandal.

He said those words across the coffee table in his private office, on the 28th floor of the World Trade Center in Baltimore, with spectacular views overlooking the Inner Harbor, in a meeting my college's president hooked up for me. I was 23, and it was weeks before I got my degree, just as the dot-com sector and the stock market went bust, around the time the housing bubble started getting inflated, a half-decade before it burst under the pressure of exorbitant home prices and sub-prime mortgages. It was before it was hot for a twenty-something from the projects to write about Corporate America in the mainstream media.

And it was before Don Imus called the Rutgers women's basketball team some nappy-headed hoes.

How does Imus relate?

What happened to Imus in the wake of his comment shows how prescient Nate's words were in framing my then-infantile career as a business writer, the real challenges for my generation and even this blog, long before I ever imagined I'd write it. Imus' words created an uproar in the media and, of course, among old-school civil rights types. But it wasn't a march or a protest that ultimately brought him down. Imus made his comment during his Wednesday, April 4 radio show. By the following Monday he'd been told he would be suspended for two weeks, but was still on the air. But the next day, April 10, Staples and Procter & Gamble pulled their ads from his TV slot on MSNBC.

General Motors shook him off the next morning, as did American Express, which had been spending a reported $1.2 million in ad dollars on the program. By that evening, MSNBC dropped Imus' show altogether. No marches. No organized boycotts. No sit-ins. Some of America's biggest companies decided that sponsoring Imus wasn't worth the risk of potentially alienating millions of black checkbooks. Maybe Spike Lee said it best in an interview on the Today Show: "I'm going to spend $100 in Staples today. I'm buying Bigelow Tea. I'm buying Procter & Gamble..."

Economics -- the civil rights platform for my generation -- was the final arbiter in the disposal of Don Imus.

And with that, I bring you this new blog, "Ways & Means", a look at how we relate to the rest of America and the world, through our individual and collective economic condition. Most of my posts will be (a lot) shorter than this, and they'll also be short on, if not devoid of my own opinions and any financial advice -- I'm a journalist, not a pundit or financial adviser, after all. Much of what I talk about here will be in the form of anecdotes that hopefully put the financial condition of black folks -- particularly our generation of black folks -- in context. And since I need to write often, I hope you all read me, either here or at my other blog, and send me all the suggestions, criticisms or ideas you have to offer. Hope you enjoy.