Earl "Skip" Cooper, II

President Emeritus, Black Business Association

CEO, Earl "Skip" Cooper Foundation,  Inc.

Earl “Skip” Cooper II has been “pivoting” since the day in 1966 when he set foot in Vietnam as a U.S. Army medic and long before the term became part of the business lexicon. It’s taken him from college student to president and CEO of Los Angeles’ Black Business Association (BBA), a role that’s enabled him to influence the minority business enterprise agenda for 45 years. Not long after leaving military service, he went on to earn an associate of arts degree in African-American studies at Merritt College, a bachelor’s in business administration from Golden Gate University in San Francisco and an MBA at the University of Southern California.

President Richard Nixon’s 1969 executive order creating the office of Minority Business Enterprise spurred a national push for economic inclusion and opened career doors for Cooper. In 1974 he joined the staff of what was to become the Los Angeles Economic Development Corporation, overseeing a state initiative helping minority-owned firms secure purchasing contracts with public and private sector organizations. It also gave him a statewide platform and an introduction to the BBA.

The mid-1970s and 1980s proved a watershed for the organization and built on the accomplishments of previous BBA leadership, particularly in encouraging then-California Assemblyman Willie Brown to author legislation creating a small business procurement preference program for state agencies. That was followed in 1976 by Cooper’s first trade mission to Washington, D.C., where a BBA delegation pressed the Congressional Small Business Committee and other federal agencies to create national minority business and procurement programs. The trade mission was a BBA signature program for the next two decades. In 1987, the late Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley, with urging from Cooper and the BBA, officially proclaimed an annual Black Business Day in Los Angeles.

Among his many accomplishments, there are two of which Cooper is particularly proud. The first is Public Law 95-507. Cooper and the BBA supported the late U.S. Rep. Parren Mitchell’s efforts to push for national legislation setting aside funding for minority small businesses whose owners were economically disadvantaged. Mitchell’s bill passed. The second is California Assembly Bill 3678. Authored by the late Assemblymember Gwen Moore, BBA chairperson and a confidante with whom Cooper had a more than 40-year-long friendship, the bill required California regulated utilities with $25 million in annual revenues to establish a supplier diversity program. What became known as California Public Utilities Commission’s General Order 156 established the procurement model for utility companies across the country.

The actions of the last administration, the Black Lives Matter movement, and ongoing institutionalized, systemic racism leave the BBA with a full agenda. “Our challenge is to bridge the racial divide and promote opportunities for all Americans and all nationalities, creeds and religions. For our part, we’ll do that by doing what we do best: promoting the growth and expansion of Black businesses as a vital part of America.”