Amalgamated Bank: A Bank President Who Embraces the Unconventional
Priscilla Sims Brown’s atypical childhood has helped her lead a financial institution from a different perspective as Amalgamated Bank’s chief executive.
Priscilla Sims Brown, chief executive of Amalgamated Bank, said it was her uncommon upbringing that put her on the path to running the country’s largest union-owned bank.
Born in 1957 to Ethiopian parents who were studying in New Mexico, she stayed behind when her mother and father returned to Africa. (Her mother, Marta Gabre-Tsadick, served as Ethiopia’s first woman senator.) She spent the next 10 years living with an American military family in a small town between two American bases in Germany.
But after a government coup in Ethiopia in the 1970s, her parents fled the country and returned to the United States. Ms. Brown joined them, and they moved from place to place while establishing a Christian nonprofit to help Ethiopian refugees.
Ms. Brown said her background gave her the confidence to pursue a path that could be difficult for women, and particularly women of color. “Having spent my formative years in Germany, there were a lot of people from a lot of places,” she said. “People can be made to feel inferior by difference. I was made to feel difference was pretty cool.”
It wasn’t until she was 14 and had returned to the United States that she experienced racism, Ms. Brown said. “I learned that racism existed, but I didn’t own the inferiority, I didn’t own the prejudice. I learned to lean into differences and be somewhat unconventional.” Her self-assurance has helped her climb the financial career ladder and to speak out on politically sensitive issues, like abortion and gun control.