Darrin Williams, a Banker for the Forgotten

Darrin Williams, a former lawyer, rose from relative obscurity when he was tapped to be a member of President Trump’s Great American Economic Revival initiative, which also included Jamie Dimon, chairman and chief executive officer of JPMorgan Chase & Co., and David Solomon, chairman and CEO of Goldman Sachs Group Inc. Their conversations with Trump and Secretary of the Treasury Steven Mnuchin ultimately led the Small Business Administration, which administered the $350 billion program, to earmark the money for so-called CDFIs.

Southern Bancorp is one of the largest of about 1,100 such institutions, which the Clinton administration chartered to invest in the poorest U.S. communities. This summer, Williams’s bank wrote $111 million in PPP loans and gave away $125,000 to small businesses in the most Covid-devastated places in the Mississippi Delta. In October, Bank of America Corp. Chairman and CEO Brian Moynihan took a 5% stake in Southern Bancorp. Williams plans to use the financial injection and the publicity surrounding the deal—as well as Big Business’s promise to do more about racial inequality—to double the bank’s $1.6 billion in assets over the next decade and whittle away at the region’s wealth gap.