Progressive Insurance is being sued for discrimination for offering grants to black-owned businesses, while excluding white, Asian, and Latinos from applying.
Progressive worked in partnership with Hello Alice to award grants to black-owned businesses.
The 10 winners were announced in a press release on Tuesday.
“Progressive Insurance®, the leading commercial auto insurer in the United States, has announced the 10 recipients of its 2023 Driving Small Business Forward grant with Hello Alice in support of Black entrepreneurs. Each small business owner has been awarded a $25,000 grant for use toward the purchase of a commercial vehicle for their business.” the press release said.
Freedom Truck Dispatch owner Nathan Roberts decided to sue Progressive Insurance after he received an email about a grant opportunity for trucking businesses.
Only he wasn’t eligible because he’s not black.
America First Legal, founded by former Trump advisor Stephen Miller, filed the lawsuit on behalf of Nathan Roberts.
The New York Post reported:
Progressive insurance, famed for its quirky commercials starring fictional saleswoman Flo, is being sued for “patently unlawful” racism for awarding exclusively black-owned businesses $25,000 — while allegedly banning white, Asian, Hispanic and owners of other backgrounds from applying.
The lawsuit — filed on behalf of Freedom Truck Dispatch owner Nathan Roberts in Ohio federal court on Wednesday — claims that Progressive racially discriminated against non-black small-business owners like Roberts for offering a five-figure award to 10 “black-owned small businesses to use toward the purchase of a commercial vehicle.”
The class-action suit, which was filed by anti-radical left group American First Legal, claimed that on May 24, Roberts, a Progressive customer, received an email “about a grant opportunity for their [Progressive’s] commercial-trucking small-business owners.”
However, “Progressive decided that only black-owned businesses would be eligible for these grants” because, according to the insurance company, “studies have shown how inequities have it harder for black entrepreneurs to access capital.”
Progressive partnered with grant administration company Hello Alice for the financial award.