by Tavis Smiley
Finally, I couldn’t contain my curiosity about the colonel any longer, so I asked him about the day I’d seen the colonel in his face. He explained that the colonel was showing him some of the techniques he could use for his preparation for drill instruction school. My father had been talking about being a drill sergeant for months, and the colonel had commanded a camp for new recruits earlier in his career.
Then my father said that someone had broken into the colonel’s house and crushed most of the bones in his body. They’d had to ship him back to the United States because he was in critical condition; they thought he should be closer to family in case he didn’t recover.
I sat there for what seemed like hours, trying to shut down the hurt that I was feeling for nearly costing a man his life. I had been so wrapped up in my own hatred of “Uncle Charlie” that I had likened the colonel to a redneck, just for being white. According to my father, the colonel had marched with Dr. King and was a member of the NAACP. I had never heard of such a thing—a white man associated with a Black organization. My comrades and I had nearly beaten to death a man who was trying to right the wrongs and injustices of this crazy world. My father wasn’t being chastised at all that day; he was being mentored.
That day, I had so much respect for my father, and felt so much guilt about my actions, that I decided to change my life. I couldn’t let my anger at the racism around me hip-check my life. Fortunately, we moved back to the United States shortly afterward, when my father received his drill sergeant assignment.
In Europe, I had accumulated more credits than were necessary to graduate from high school in the United States. I used the additional half year of school to raise my GPA from 2.7 to 3.6. That gave me options.
I applied to and was accepted at Purdue. Given my love of math and science, I decided to become an engineer.
I was accustomed to being around white people, but this campus was white on another level. I was one of two Blacks in my freshman class to actually matriculate in the engineering program, and I completed it in three years.
I discovered that racism remained rampant in the United States. Black people were still marching in the streets and begging “Uncle Charlie” and his cousin “Uncle Sam” for jobs, housing, equal access, and equal rights. Disproving all the racist beliefs about Blacks being less intelligent than whites became my quest.
When you decide to go head to head with “Uncle Charlie,” you soon find out that if you are too good, “Uncle Charlie” will change the rules on you quickly. He likes to declare that you should get an education, work hard, and pull yourself up by your bootstraps. What he fails to tell you is that he determines (1) how much education you will need to get the same job and (2) how to lace those bootstraps (you know Black people can be creative with them bootstraps, too). Black people know they need to be three times as good to get the same job. Our mistake is in thinking that the playing field is level.
Toward the end of my senior year, I was one of two people at the top of the class with a 4.0 average. The other was a white guy named Rick. He was quick-witted and very smart. He and I weren’t friends, but we were respectful of one another. Rick was weak in the area of calculus programming, and I knew that there was no way he could get any better than a B out of our final class, which would leave me as sole valedictorian.
I went to see my professor before the end of the semester, and as I approached his office I overheard the professor speaking to someone about Rick. Turns out he was talking to Rick’s father about his son’s grade, and it wasn’t going to be an A. Rick’s father started talking about his contributions to the university and how his son needed this grade not only to graduate as valedictorian but to give a kick-start to his professional career. My professor bent, folded, and collapsed as fast as the market for a two-dollar bill. Rick became valedictorian.
Upon graduation, I went to work for a major computer company. At the time that I joined, they were among the first in the industry to establish an internal campus for continuing education. Their purpose was to mold engineers and computer scientists into managers and project engineers. Upon completion, each one of us would graduate with an MBA. Although it was 1976, I was the only Black in the Program.
To get through the Program, you had to complete a project that the company could put into practice. To do this the project had to be original and plausible. I took the concept of the banking system and turned it into a product system where everything you bought could be processed through one system processor, using one card—the software, of course, being supplied by our company. Not only did I get my MBA, but I also once again graduated at the top of my class. The company adopted my project and made billions.
During the next ten years, I was promoted to many midlevel management positions. I finally came under the thumb of a chief information officer (CIO) named Bob. This guy constantly addressed me as “the genius,” in a way that made it clear he thought of it as a joke.
I came up with an idea about selling our services to individual businesses via the Web. The CIO didn’t see any benefit to this. Today, the Web is commonplace, but in 1990, when I made the presentation, it was virtually unheard of for businesses to sell commercially over this medium. Over the next five years the company, through my Web management, became the leader in Web site creation services and products. And I took Bob’s place as CIO.
As CIO, I was responsible for planning future ventures and acquisitions for the company. I interfaced with the new vice president of marketing, a gregarious guy who made friends easily and ostensibly was next in line for the CEO job. The marketing VP saw me as a threat, and time and again instigated marketing changes without notifying me. This caused programming changes and other overtime costs for my departments, affecting my budget.
Nonetheless, when it came time for the chairman to announce the new CEO, the person he chose was me. I had been selected to run a multimillion-dollar company.
At any number of points in my life, I could have broken down, given in, and succumbed to racism. What kept me going were the dreams, blood, and sweat of Black folk who had come before me. No matter what obstacles “Uncle Charlie” erected, I knew that I could not let Black people down. Zack had it right about me long ago when he said, “Now there’s a bad boy on board.”
REPAYMENT
Ronald R. Lawson
I’m forty-nine years old. I graduated with a B.A. from Holy Cross College in 1975, an M.S. from Carnegie-Mellon University in 1978, and received a postgraduate certificate in accounting from the Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University in 1979.
I spent fourteen years working in the financial services arena on Wall Street. Then, in 1991, I lost my job. Given my educational background and my professional experiences, I thought it would take me only a few weeks to find a job. I was wrong. Weeks turned into months. At the same time, I tore my knee up skiing and had no medical insurance. So I spent a significant part of the lowest period in my life on crutches. I lost my apartment in Brooklyn because I couldn’t pay the rent and found myself basically homeless. There were many nights I ate cereal because that’s all I could afford.
A friend of a friend of mine, whom I barely knew, offered to put me up. Having no recourse, I agreed. I put all my possessions in storage (which I lost when they auctioned them off because I couldn’t pay the storage fees), except for my mattress and three wardrobe boxes of clothes. I’ll never forget the night I moved in, because I spent it sleeping on the floor with a sheet over me, tucked under the mattress so the roaches on the floor wouldn’t crawl on me.
Fortunately I was, and still am, blessed with a remarkable group of friends. One of them, Westina Matthews, Senior VP at Merrill Lynch, invited me to church with her one day. It was there that I met the minister, Dr. Paul Smith, who is still my minister, mentor, and friend. I would visit Paul on a regular basis and pray and counsel with him. He continually told me to keep my head up and stay strong because “hard times don’t last always!”
&
nbsp; When I would leave Paul, he would often give me an envelope with maybe fifteen or sixteen dollars and one or two subway tokens. He told me it was from a fund the church had for people who needed help. Well, I’ve been a member of the church board for the last five years and I now know there is no such fund. Paul was giving me whatever he could from his own pocket!
Another friend, Ken Glover, was asked by then Mayor David Dinkins if he would serve as his treasurer for his 1992 reelection campaign. Ken asked me if I would work with him to set up the appropriate campaign financial systems. I agreed, and after several months Ken and Bill Lynch, the campaign manager, asked if I would stay on as finance director.
So, in a matter of months I went from having no job, no money, and no home, to being finance director of the largest and most important political campaign in the country in 1993. I managed an $11 million campaign budget and had a staff of twenty-five, and was called to strategy sessions and receptions at Gracie Mansion, the mayor’s residence.
Because of my campaign involvement, I met my wife, a woman I had met twenty years before but had not seen or heard from until we were reacquainted during the campaign. We got married six months after the campaign ended and now have a beautiful five-year-old daughter.
When I reflect upon that period in my life, I remember saying to all my friends, and those who supported me during those difficult times, “I can never repay you all for all that you did for me.” To a person, they told me, “We don’t expect you to, we expect you to do it for somebody else.”
And so I do.
FAITH
THE SUBSTANCE OF THINGS HOPED FOR
Tavis Smiley
The book of Hebrews declares that “Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” There are three things in life that I think sustain us. I call them the three F’s: faith, family, and friends.
I don’t know how people survive, let alone thrive, without having an abiding faith in something bigger and beyond them. Faith is what makes this universe work.
I believe the ultimate compliment is to have someone put faith in your ability to deliver. People do not necessarily put their confidence in you or believe in you because the evidence is there for them to do so. Rather, they are doing it in light of the biblical definition of faith: the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things not seen. In other words, people often have put faith in us simply because they believe in us, not because they have evidence to support their belief. It’s easy to bet on Tiger Woods and on Michael Jordan in their respective sports if you’ve seen them play before, because the evidence abounds that they are the best at what they do. Faith is not really a factor here. Let me tell you about faith.
I ran for a seat on the Los Angeles City Council in 1991. I was a twenty-six-year-old kid who had never run for public office before. My opponent was the incumbent, and early on I realized that I was going to be vastly outspent. But I just campaigned harder, and the closer it got to election day, the more it appeared that I had a reasonable chance of forcing a runoff with the incumbent, although there was never any evidence to suggest I could beat her. I was running a “faith” campaign.
As we neared the end of the campaign, with literally just weeks to go, I ran out of money. My funds were so depleted that my campaign manager and my staff had not been paid in weeks. I didn’t have the money to print any more brochures or lawn signs. I was completely dry.
My mother apparently had talked to someone on my campaign staff and found out that I had run out of money. She had enough faith in me (and was crazy enough) to go down to her bank and mortgage her house to get me the additional money that I needed to finish my campaign.
Fortunately, I overheard someone on my staff share this news with another campaign staff person. When I caught up with my mother, she was actually on her way to the bank to get the money. I had to stop her from going through with it. But I cannot tell you how moved to tears I was that my mother thought enough of me and had enough faith in me to mortgage her house on my behalf. My mother has always believed in me, and the myriad ways she has demonstrated this have helped me to develop into the person I am today.
Having just one person truly believe in you is one of life’s greatest and most precious gifts.
If more of our young people had someone who really believed in them, who demonstrated unwavering faith and trust in them, I think they would be capable of achieving great things. More often than not, our young people deliver what is simply ordinary because we adults don’t expect the extraordinary. Nor do we give them the proper tools to perform at a high level. In this respect, there is much that we adults can do to help advance our young people on their journey through life.
Sometimes you have to believe with all your heart in someone else, and conversely have someone believe in you in exactly the same way. We owe this to each other, as African Americans, and we owe it especially to our young people.
DETOUR OF FAITH
Cynthia Gary
The summer following my college graduation was one of those moments in time when it seems as though everything in the universe is in perfect alignment. I had decided to stray from my original plans and take a year off before going on to graduate school. Thus began the detour that I would never forget.
I returned to my hometown to find a summer job. Before long, I was hired as a part-time instructor for a six-week summer youth program. I had decided to work with middle and high school students; there was no way I was going to work with the smaller children. All that noise and running around—I didn’t want any part of it! I arrived for my first day, but there were only a few teenagers signed up, so I volunteered to go to a different location. When I arrived at my new location, the program manager led me into a large classroom. She discovered no one was in charge of that class, so she cheerfully said to me, “Great, this can be your class.” As I slowly looked around, I struggled to maintain my composure. Twenty-five pairs of kindergarten eyes locked onto mine. My detour had just hit a speed bump.
I knew next to nothing about teaching children. I had just graduated with a degree in biology, so while rats and frogs were no problem, five-year-old humans made me queasy. However, I knew that children are like sponges and that the amount of knowledge they can soak up is astonishing. Contained in that classroom was a miniature version of the world. Every personality was completely distinct from the next; a few of the faces, however, stand out in my mind. There was a girl I called “chocolate baby doll” because she had one of the prettiest complexions and faces I had ever seen. There were boys who, I was told, had difficulty learning. There was a girl who smiled at everything and was upset by nothing. Then there was the little bossy girl who could run faster than any of the boys. For a parent or a teacher, none of this is a revelation, but for me it was a new perspective. In a few short weeks I had gone from petri dishes to pandemonium.
Because I knew very little about teaching children, I taught them what I thought they should know—reading, writing, and ’rithmetic. Ignorance is sometimes bliss. I did not realize that my lessons were too advanced for five-year-olds, and they did not know what their lessons should be. So there we were, twenty-six peas in a pod, about to embark on a six-week journey.
As each day went by, I became more and more determined to teach them as much as I could. Although there were the typical rules the children had to obey, I had only one edict—no excuses. There would be absolutely no excuses why they could not do their best. Ignorance, stubbornness, and my mother’s expectations were the architects of my proclamation. I spent my own money to buy supplies for them: addition and subtraction flash cards, activity books for the first and second grades, construction paper to draw the outline of the African continent. Too much for a five-year-old? Maybe, but what did I know? The funny thing is, they were catching on to everything I threw at them. These little chocolate-faced children were learning more than they should have—more than many would have expected of them.
I sometimes t
ease my mother that she never told me that I was a little Black southern girl and that there were just some things I should not know—such as math and science. I kid my mother that because of her negligence in explaining about the limited expectations of a little Black girl, I actually believed I was smart and that I could do absolutely anything. I simply did not know that odds were against me. I just read and learned everything I could because I truly believed I was just as good as any student in my class or in the world. I often teased my mom about that. But I was being negligent in just the same manner that summer. For those six weeks the twenty-six of us believed we could read and learn, and so we did.
It was not until close to the end of the program that I knew I was neither hated nor feared. I had been not the conqueror of this little world, but rather simply a guide, and the children had been my companions on the trip. The parent of one of my most challenging students said to me, “So you’re Miss Gary. My son talks about you all the time—Miss Gary this and Miss Gary that.” I could not believe the boy who had gone from having the most excuses to no excuses would even give me a second thought! I discovered that children are full of wonderful surprises.
I have seen only a couple of those children since that summer, and I am no longer a teacher today. So what was the purpose of that detour in my life? We must learn to trust the process of life, regardless of the turns, twists, bumps, delays, construction zones, or detours. Yes, the summer following my college graduation was a detour—but, because of my faith, I did not speed through the construction zone. I enjoyed the scenery and the rainbow of twenty-six different shades of chocolate. They were my sign that my trip was right on schedule.
THE KIND ASIAN MAN
John Pettiford
I remember the sweet smell of warm sugar doughnuts against the agonizing self-consciousness of a nine-year-old boy in a family once again on the move. It was 1989, the fourth time we were forced to leave a homeless shelter in southern California. Too weary to keep fighting the system, my mother had become strangely complacent. Eight months pregnant, she went through the motions of daily tasks only because there was no one else to do them. This strange reality was becoming commonplace to her. But I could tell many times, as I caught her daydreaming, that she was actually calculating a means of escape, a desperate route to lead us back somehow to the life we’d once known.