Last month, during a panel discussion at the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation’s (CBCF) Annual Legislative Conference , Angie Nixon started in on a critique of capitalism. For a moment, it sounded like she was going to hedge on what she wanted to say, for fear of offending one of the foundation’s longtime corporate sponsors.

“I met the Walmart person earlier, but…,” Nixon said sheepishly.

Saying as little as possible after that would have made sense. After all, the CBCF — a nonprofit public policy institute founded by members of the Congressional Black Caucus — is a major pillar in America’s Black power structure. Conventional political wisdom would advise the upstart Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate in Florida to avoid upsetting anyone.

But instead, Nixon, in a bright yellow blazer, leaned forward in her chair and kept going.

Walmart, she suggested, was a prime example of corporate socialism.

“Walmart receives subsidies and kickbacks — tax breaks — for hiring people who are on the system,” she said. “But they are on the system in the first place, because they don’t want to pay them a decent, living wage.”

She continued: “And so what this stuff is revealing to me is that there’s actually enough money going around. And billionaires and corrupt corporations need to pay people what they owe. And we wouldn’t be in this situation in the first place.”

Nixon’s comments highlight the contradiction at the root of the conference, which has long been the largest annual gathering of Black political power. An event that claims to be driving “the political, economic, and social advancement of Black communities worldwide” depends on the generosity of companies increasingly seen as holding back that advancement, through problematic business practices and political spending that stalls the legislative action that Black communities need.

I mean, seriously, before reaching the room where Nixon was disparaging Walmart, I walked past a Palantir welcome sign and spotted the Meta Pavilion.

This corporate barrage has been standard at the conference. It’s what I found when I first attended in 2018 as a newly minted manager at a community development lender. Big banks sponsored the financial-literacy sessions; Big Tech representatives led talks on Black tech entrepreneurship. Some of us grumbled about it privately. But the prevailing mood was resignation. This is how it goes. The Black community doesn’t have enough generational wealth, the argument went, so we need corporations to help us get ahead. It’s the same argument many Black members of Congress use to justify taking corporate PAC money to “win elections,” even in safe Blue seats.

It wasn’t always like this. The Congressional Black Caucus was formed in 1970 and had its first Annual Legislative Conference the following year . Early sponsors were mostly consumer goods companies with little say over programming.

But since the 1990s, the conference, like Washington itself, has deepened its corporate ties in tandem with the rise of the neoliberal era. According to this year’s brochure, sponsors get more than branding opportunities. They get “issue forum and braintrust partnerships” (whatever that means) and the chance to “participate on issue forum panels (subject to CBCF approval).” “Premier” sponsorships can be as high as $1.5 million. “Issue Forum Brain Trusts” go for $10,000 to $25,000.

For years, the few of us who objected worked around the edges. As Director of Policy and Advocacy at the American Economic Liberties Project, I helped to host panels during the conference week with a more populist economic frame, on housing and wealth-building with Black union members and on inequality and antitrust with former Biden enforcers Doha Mekki and Elizabeth Wilkins. But those events and discussions were just a blip in a sea of corporate lobbyists and propaganda claiming that public-private partnerships would close the racial wealth gap.

But this year’s conference felt different. In addition to Nixon calling out Walmart, Democratic Rep. Summer Lee of Pennsylvania used her allotted panel time to directly challenge some of the conference’s sponsors and other corporate actors, including healthcare conglomerates driving up costs. Lee tied the sponsors to the money flooding politics, and argued that only a radical Black movement can beat it.

It’s not the first time she’s done so at a CBCF conference, but it felt all the more powerful as she was flanked on the panel by upstart Democratic congressional nominees Melat Kiros of Colorado and Darializa Chevalier of New York, who won their primaries with anti-corporate and anti-establishment messages.

Said Lee : “If we’re still mimicking white power structures while we’re seeking political office… then I don’t think that we’re building Black political power at all. We’re putting Black faces on white political power.”

That candidates like Nixon, Kiros, and Chevalier have a chance of reaching Washington at all reflects a changing electorate. Nixon beat an establishment-backed opponent by organizing voters that others ignored, and her critique of corporate socialism as a Democratic Socialists of America member resonated in Black working-class communities. Lee, who refuses corporate PAC money, described how being genuinely unbought and unbossed has allowed her to withstand millions in AIPAC money spent against her.

The Black critique of corporate influence in the U.S. is reaching far and wide. Mainstream Black publications, like Ebony , are starting to question the impact of data centers and AI on communities of color. And a recent poll found that 73 percent of Black voters support Medicare for All.

It’s a shift, I fear, that reflects troubling economic trends for Black Americans, who are dealing with high gas, food, and utility costs without the fallback of generational wealth. In 2025, employment among Black women fell by 1.4 percent, one of the steepest drops in 25 years . Most of those losses impacted women with college degrees, like those in attendance at the CBCF conference.

I keep thinking about the end of the panel discussion featuring Nixon. A woman who appeared to be in her 30s stood up. She said she was a lawyer who had been laid off twice in the past year. She said she was only getting by because her parents were in a position to help her a little, and she was looking to the panel for advice on what to do.

For a moment, the panel turned into an impromptu career and life coaching session. The panel’s moderator, Massachusetts Democratic Congresswoman Ayana Pressley, directed a staffer to get the woman’s contact information to see if they could help her get a job. Nixon and others on the panel spoke about the importance of developing mutual aid networks to withstand unpredictable economic tides to come. The corporate lobbyists were surely in the room; Nixon had acknowledged them earlier. But none of them said a word.

I don’t expect corporate sponsors like Dominion Energy to disappear from CBCF events overnight. But the next generation of Black attendees and elected officials are beginning to hold themselves to a higher standard and get real about challenging corporate power, whether out of ideological conviction or financial necessity.

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