Fitz Hill, Scott Ford, and Richard Massey are principals in the nexus of corruption that surrounds a Little Rock HBCU
Howard University isn't the only HBCU scandal afoot. There's Little Rock's Arkansas Baptist College where a nexus of well-connected and corrupt cronies raise money in the school's name while ABC falls deeper and deeper into debt. Attallah Nasir, in two previous investigative reports, documented a myriad of scandals and corruption at Arkansas Baptist College, an HBCU in Little Rock. She underscored that Dr. Fitz Hill had been raising money in the name of the college unscrupulously although based on normative standards of fundraising, his major donors, Scott Ford and Rick Massey are major financiers.
Why can’t ABC successfully raise funds? Other colleges with titans of industry and bankers as sponsors and trustees build up an endowment and function with minimal debt. Is it because these relationships of Christian fellowship are actually focused on re-dividing property in the surrounding neighborhood of the college and not sustaining the college as a learning institution? Hill, Massey, Ford, and Board of Trustee members like Richard Mays, Regina Favors, Bill Walker, and Bob Nash (also previously profiled by Nasir), are seemingly using the alienated and illiterate to maintain a strategic position to seize the property of the school and surrounding neighborhood. Also, shadowy entities, dubious fundraising campaigns, personal companies posing as College cooperatives, and even acquaintances with African dictators inform the vile and duplicitous at Arkansas Baptist College. There are many reasons not to give to this HBCU. Among them is a discovery of the means and methods by which Hill raises funds that never benefit education at the college.
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Dr. Fitz Hill, the current Arkansas Baptist College Foundation executive director and former president of Arkansas Baptist College, raises money nebulously under multiple overlapping premises and blurs his personality with ABC’s identity and logo.
Hill fundraises in the name of “First and Ten,” where he promotes youth football, and crusades against “black on black” crime. The ill-defined and imprecise website suggests that “First and 10” may be a giving program for the Foundation at Arkansas Baptist College (not to be confused with the Arkansas Baptist College Foundation), but it does not explicitly say so. Hill has also raised money for both Arkansas Baptist College (the school) and Arkansas Baptist College Foundation. Both are non-profit entities, with 501(c)3 tax exemption statuses. Yet in recent years, since 2014 to be exact, the Arkansas Baptist College Foundation 501c(3) status has been revoked, though Hill became the executive director/president of the ABC Foundation in 2016, and he was president of the College from 2006-2016. Is Fitz Hill the executive director of the Arkansas Baptist College Foundation? Or is it the Foundation at Arkansas Baptist College or First and 10? Does the College receive the funds from these entities, and are the students assisted with these dollars?
What’s more, his focus on “black on black crime.” It erroneously elevates white supremacist myths about Black self-destruction. Hill insists Black self-destruction produces more killing than the history of lynching and police brutality combined; yet, there is no record of him ever being associated with fighting the Klan, and he is a friend of the police who often kill Black people systematically. How does Hill not understand how statistics can lie: how only one slave-master’s lynching or one police killing can be a small percentage of total surveillance interactions, and can produce terror leading a people to be conquered and servile?
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Fitz Hill constantly blurs the line between personal advancement, private property, opportunity for all, and communal development.
The Foundation at Arkansas Baptist College ultimately reveals Hill’s and his sponsors’ ambitions. “At” is not “of.” The foundation they wish to be located at ABC but not have the education mission of the college be sovereign over the fundraising. They wish to use ABC as a beachhead, using Black community identity as a veil for white missionary capitalists’ ambitions to gentrify the surrounding neighborhood. Instead of “putting the neighbor back in the hood,” they want to dispossess poor Black people out of the community while simultaneously encouraging corporate capital to occupy the neighborhood. Hill does this by promoting Black business and a “think and grow rich” mentality that mystifies how money falls into people’s laps as a “blessing.”
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Fitz’s Hill is involved in corporate chicanery.
Hill created the African Bean Company (ABC), good for cashing checks written to the college, and Roots Java, under the premise of a cooperative owned by ABC. Then when the Higher Learning Commission (HLC), the regional accrediting body for post-secondary education in the central United States, questioned his ethics as a college president, Hill admitted it was his own private entity, took on a partner, and claimed the business was based in Oklahoma. It seems to be a front for Little Rock’s Westrock Coffee and Rwanda Trading Company owned by Scott Ford, a donor to ABC (the college, not the coffee business). Hill suggests he invented “a coffee brand,” but what he has really revealed is that he lacks capital but seeks to exploit Black labor. It is Ford’s Westrock Coffee that puts Roots Java in different bags with an African Diaspora/missionary theme.
Along with his presidency/executive directorship of the ABC Foundation, Hill is also the director of the Scott Ford Institute for Entrepreneurship and Community Development at the College. Initially, there was a pretense of students starting their own businesses in “underserved” communities as a learning methodology. Using “Icehouse” principles, ABC students were taught they could become successful business owners with no capital. Opportunity was to be had by romancing Jim Crow and learning to be of use to more powerful white people.
The “Icehouse” machination was invented by Clifton Taulbert, whose autobiography was the basis of the movie Once Upon A Time When We Were Colored and a self-help book Who Owns the Ice House? Taulbert markets his icehouse principles as having humanized the FBI and Department of Defense. For colored people (but not Blacks) those that spy on, conquer and kill people of color can work in communities animated by reason and concern for the welfare of all, especially when they are compensated for facilitating redemptive rituals. Taulbert is now Hill’s partner in elevating the fraud that a Black owned company (with no capital and employees) is “disrupting” the distribution chain of coffee in the U.S. The Black press will sustain a “world of make believe” where it is not a protest leader against injustice.
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Fitz Hill pals around with an advisor to a particularly bloodthirsty African dictator.
Scott Ford formed Westrock Capital Partners in 2009 after orchestrating the sale of Alltel Corporation, one of the nation’s leading telecommunications companies, to Verizon. He now serves on the board of AT&T. Ford also worked as an investment banker for Merrill Lynch in New York and Stephens Inc. in Little Rock prior to joining Alltel.
Scott founded Westrock Coffee and Rwanda Trading Company in 2009 to export coffee and build agribusinesses in Rwanda. He serves on President Paul Kagame’s Advisory Council. Ford and Hill have been among those who have wished to elevate the profile of Kagame’s Rwanda in the U.S. as a story of redemption following the 1994 genocide. Scott Ford took Hill to Rwanda Hill said “there was almost a connection” between himself and the Africans he met there.
While it is good for HBCUs to have connections with and emphasize education about Africa, Hill seems to have picked the most bloodthirsty dictator on the continent with which to associate himself. Rwanda’s jails are bursting with political prisoners, and his opponents in presidential elections - which he wins in the 90% range - are invariably locked up or killed. His assassins pursue and murder political opponents across the African continent and into Europe. After shooting down the plane carrying the presidents of Burundi and Rwanda to start the civil war, the Fort Leavenworth trained dictator shot his way to power with an army that included child soldiers and was responsible for a sizeable share of the 800,000 murders in Rwanda that year.
In his two decades in power Kagame has, along with Uganda, a neighboring US puppet state, invaded and looted the Eastern Congo, turning the region into a lawless wasteland to facilitate the extraction of gold, strategic minerals and timber. Six million Congolese have perished since the mid 1990s, the highest death toll anywhere on earth since the second World War. And now Rwanda is an exporter of gold and other minerals which are found nowhere in Rwandan territory. Scott Ford has testified before Congress that his coffee business in Rwanda is part of a strategy of U.S. national security. This might actually be true, as US policy in the region seems to hinge upon Rwanda’s usefulness in the genocidal looting of eastern Congo.
Ford promotes the myth that free markets empower the poorest of people.
But Ford took over a failed coffee business in Rwanda that was run on a free market basis previously – Rwanda has never been a socialist country. Ford relies on friendship with the state for his accumulation activities in Rwanda and Little Rock. Further, Ford claims to be helping peasant coffee farmers, allowing them the blessing of clean bathrooms in their workplaces and helping them secure school fees for their children. Both Ford and Hill, in Rwanda and Little Rock, seek out dependent “rice bowl” Christians, people not with prophetic faith, but those who in devastating circumstances will be silent in the presence of anybody who can help them eat. Of course, Africans in Rwanda and Little Rock know how to farm. They are still learning how to control the means of social reproduction in an environment of threats.
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Fitz Hill is chummy with a man who appears to be one of the architects of the housing crisis that shunted millions of people into peril and despair.
One of Fitz Hill’s other major donor/sponsors is Richard Nelson Massey, also known as Rick. He has been a Partner of Westrock Capital, LLC since 2009, and he is the manager of Bear State Financial (BSF) Holdings. Mr. Massey served as the Chief Executive Officer and President of Bear State Financial, Inc. from 2014 to 2015 and has been BSF’s Chairman and Director since 2011.
Hill is curiously on the corporate board of BSF. Given how he left ABC and his own admission of financial difficulty, Hill’s seat on the board is strange at best. Massey also worked with Scott Ford when he served as Chief Strategy Officer and General Counsel at Alltel Corporation from 2006 to 2009. Both Massey and Ford have worked for Stephens Inc., the firm that facilitated the first public offering of Wal-Mart and occasionally donates to ABC.
Massey has led several large and complex transactions in the software, information technology and telecommunications industries. Massey is also associated with the mortgage lending industry. He has been the Director of Black Knight Financial Services since 2014. Behind Black Knight is a corporate merger that covers up a skill-set behind Hill’s ambition to “put the neighbor back in the hood.” Massey has been an Independent Director of Fidelity National Financial, Inc. (FNF) since 2006 and its Lead Director since 2014. He served as an Independent Director of Fidelity National Information Services, Inc. (FIS) from 2006 to 2017 and served as its Lead Director until 2017. Mr. Massey also serves as Director of Service Link Holdings, LLC.
According to Ben Lane at Housingwire, Service Link is part of the reorganization of Lender Processing Services (LPS) which was fined $65 million dollars by the Federal Reserve Board and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, and is to be paid to the U.S. Treasury. Service Link is part of FNF and Black Knight. This fine was related to the 2011 Housing Mortgage Bubble Crisis, specifically industry-wide foreclosure misconduct.
Why is Massey’s firm being fined so much money? Is he responsible for betraying small home owners? Is he culpable for speculating in bundled debts? Did he not provide enough capital and insurance to lenders whose mortgage loans failed?
How much money do you have to do in business to be fined $65 million dollars and not go to jail? Hundreds of millions or billions of dollars in business? Did Scott Ford, who has been a director of the Little Rock branch of the Federal Reserve in St. Louis, help Massey settle this violation of the law for Massey’s group?
If Massey and Ford can maneuver out of debts, fines and do business in the hundreds of millions why can’t they resolve Arkansas Baptist College’s problems? Or teach Dr. Hill how to manage the school’s affairs more efficiently? They don’t because that is not their interest in Arkansas Baptist College.
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Arkansas Baptist College is over $30 million dollars in debt which includes a debt-consolidation loan that Hill took out to obscure his capital building projects.
Fitz Hill organized a 30 million-dollar U.S. Department of Education-guaranteed bond, issued through the Historically Black Colleges & Universities Capital Loan Financing Program. Procured in 2014, the loan was aimed to pay off short-term debt, reduce debt-service costs, ultimately building cash reserves and restore fiscal vitality at ABC. Payment of this loan, which needs to be serviced every six months, varies. But each payment is at least a half million dollars but sometimes up to almost $800,000. The college’s working budget is approximately $17 million a year. ABC has no endowment. ABC also has millions of dollars in arrears of unpaid bills, and in the past has struggled with payroll.
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Arkansas Baptist College and how it is operated and financed is an amalgam of all that is debased and wretched. The Interim President, Howard Gibson, is a lackey of Dr. Hill, and has no personal faith in the solvency of ABC.
Recently, interim college president Dr. Howard Gibson stood before the college faculty and staff and implored them that in order to save their jobs they must not talk to the media– apparently some did not comply. Further, Gibson insisted that all must recruit students to ABC. This is despite the fact that college admissions and recruitment is a profession that is supposed to have ethics and cannot be the activity of everyone. Someone has to be responsible for the actual learning process and measuring incoming students’ abilities.
Gibson, who was previously chief academic officer and who was fired by Dr. Jones (the scrutinized immediate past president), in this same recent meeting pointed to Hill, and said to the faculty and staff, “if they like getting paid on time…,” they should be clear it is Hill who is responsible for that; not Jones, who “bankrupted” the school. Perhaps the question Dr. Gibson should be asking is how Hill is able to continuously garner bridge loans when the administration falls short month-to-month? Is Hill the spook that sits by the door of Massey and Ford to maintain ABC on a skeleton budget, but nothing more, until their greater plan comes to fruition?
Gibson, of course, also enjoys getting paid on time. Gibson has so much faith in ABC, Hill, and the college trustees, he is still technically employed by Shorter College, though he may be on leave.
Too Big to Fail?
To be clear, Fitz Hill is friends with Rick Massey and Scott Ford, who are apparently owners of banks and have so much power that they are peers and colleagues with the Federal Reserve administrators (the people who print money). During the 2009 recession, we saw the U.S. government decide that certain firms were “too big to fail.” In other words, the titans of finance and industry’s debts could be forgiven, not working people’s housing mortgages or credit card debts.
Why is Arkansas Baptist College seemingly “too big to fail?” It has already failed Black students with the lowest graduation rate among all HBCUs. Banks can seize its land and property, both the buildings for education and auxiliary properties, with legal cause at any time. According to the Wesley Peachtree Group’s forensic/operational assessment and whistleblowers, the federal government can cut off issuing financial aid to ABC students for the college’s gross mismanagement. Yet ABC continues to go stumbling and bumbling along.
When the college is financially allowed to collapse, personal advancement NOT communal development will reign. When the college’s properties are auctioned off the government and financiers like Massey and Ford will shift into another gear of their master-plan. Hill and his gang are confusing re-division of property with care and concern for the Black community as a whole. How do they do it? Like in Rwanda, they need political repression, mis-education, or really a dictator, to create fear among Black people to achieve “putting the neighbor back in the hood.” Gentrification of the Black community will lead to the dispossession of Black toilers.
Further, those seeking the privileges of sustained real estate development projects, or whom wish to be lenders to the builders, need the pretense of morality and progress to justify the seizing of the land, and more importantly the enclosing of the commons or the economic resources put aside for Black working and poor people to live self-reliantly. HBCUs are supposed to be the commons of the descendants of the enslaved, since 40 acres and a mule were not provided as discussed during Reconstruction.
Though it is a stretch to call Dr. Hill an intellectual, theologian, or an independent business man, his racial burlesque as propped up by Massey and Ford, reveals the low esteem that these white missionary financiers have for the Black community. Criminal enterprises can be carried out more convincingly by sophisticated people in the art of reading, writing and public speaking. Yet Massey and Ford have concluded that African Americans of Little Rock will take advice on economic development from a loser football coach.
In 1994, the same year as the Rwanda genocide that most still do not fully understand, the policy of “empowerment zones” was implemented by the U.S. government and financial institutions. “New Market Tax Credits” are a similar policy that came later. From Baltimore to Little Rock, these zones were created to give incentives to Big Business and bankers to invest in shattered communities marked by crime, drugs, and unemployment. These policies did not empower the unemployed, the poor, the toilers. Most of these communities of color did not have whites of means move in as neighbors in the first weeks or years but this did create real estate speculation.
In a similar way, Massey and Ford will wait (no matter where they choose to ultimately reside) while Hill entertains and distracts. Every piece of land that the college buys in the present doesn’t need to be worth anything initially in order for “entrepreneurs” with large gobs of capital to eventually seize it.
Before anyone sends their child or donates time, talent and treasure to ABC, one needs to bear in mind these inconsistencies, questions and relationships where bowing to white capitalist missionaries whose interest in the college is clearly NOT learning and education, but the land and property that will eventually increase their profits, once consolidated and later auctioned.
If the community does not give money to the school, it is not only a rejection of Dr. Hill and the Board of Trustees of ABC, but a repudiation of their ludicrous approach to political, economic, and educational development.
The truth is all colleges and universities are not guardians of “the American Dream.” Some are minimum security prisons for the reserve army of the unemployed. Some are mere fronts for speculative real estate development. “The dream” reproduces inequality for someone as it creates opportunity for those who are willing to exploit or look the other way while others are conquered.
It is not a fraud that dispossessed Blacks face only because of their color. Financiers like Massey and Ford may ultimately discard Hill as a liability, writing him off as a bad investment, and find another front-man to bewilder the Black community. Their investment in “the foundation at Arkansas Baptist College” may not bear fruit next month or even in a few years. But it will take more vigilance than opposition to the minstrel Dr. Hill to overcome this challenge. It will take a Black pride that questions government and economics and lives by a more polished ethic than “get rich or die trying.” It will take rejection of the slavery of the past and the dependent wage earning of the present; an awareness that any exploitation of working families is wrong by aspiring wealthy people regardless of color. While “enterprising” people of color may find it useful to be the bodyguards of white capital while they preach racial uplift from a pulpit of bones, the only people they will be permitted to exploit are of their own race. Be mindful what is happening at Arkansas Baptist College is a local phase of a world problem.
Contact Zacharia Wilkderson at [email protected]
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