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CEBC IN THE NEWS
The Faces of Affirmative
Action
Published Sunday, June 5, 2005 by
the Des Moines Business Record.
By Beth Dalbey
By the time Orbie Boggs and his
minority co-workers formed the Alliance of Black Telecommunications
Professionals in 1975, nearly two decades of service to Northwestern Bell
Telephone Co. (later US West Inc. and now Qwest Communications International
Inc.) had already shown him discrimination’s ugly face. It had been naked and
unshielded, brazen and ubiquitous. It had overlooked African-Americans,
relegated them to cleaning up other people’s trash or providing other janitorial
services, limited their chances to advance. Through the years, discrimination
had proved itself to be a devious enemy of people who simply sought the same
rights as their white co-workers.
Remarkably, it seems, the now-retired Boggs harbors no animosity. Negativity, he
says, is a wasted emotion. Yet in his story is an important civil rights battle
fought quietly in homogenous Des Moines, Iowa, where a group of African-American
telephone company workers promoted by affirmative hiring practices formed the
Iowa Area
Black Managers Association, later named the ABPT, to help them survive in a
mostly white corporate culture. The ABPT, which celebrates its 30th anniversary
June 10-11, spawned similar chapters throughout the former Bell System, and US
West, one of the seven “Baby Bell” regional operating companies created by the
breakup of the system, was cited nationally for its commitment to a pluralistic
workforce.
Boggs’ first job with the telephone company in 1956 was in the service bureau, a
port of entry into the sprawling Bell System for most African-Americans in those
days. It was the same year buses in Montgomery, Ala., were desegregated after a
year of boycotting and legal battles but also the same year 10 Southern members
of Congress urged states to resist the 1954 Supreme Court ruling that declared
segregated schools to be unconstitutional, seemingly incongruous developments
demonstrating how deeply race relations divided America at the time. It was
eight years before President Lyndon B. Johnson put his signature on the sweeping
Civil Rights Act of 1964, landmark legislation that prohibited discrimination in
public places, schools, lodging, federal programs and employment. Affirmative
hiring as a strategy to improve workplace equality loomed far over the distant
horizon.
In 1956 and the years following, bias against African-Americans took many forms,
from the outright discrimination in a note passed from one supervisor to another
containing words that still sting, “that I was jealous and kind of like other
black folks, felt discriminated against,” Boggs recalled, putting himself back
in the history of almost a half century ago, to the more subtle bias found in
“We don’t look at you as being black,” the begrudging acceptance of a white
co-worker when after Boggs was promoted to a management position.
“I am that,” Boggs said, a laugh punctuating the assertion as he put himself
back in the present. “What they were trying to say was, ‘You’re just like me.’
I’m probably being more magnanimous and generous than I should be, but in
looking at the people were dealing with, they had come from little towns where
there were no black people and they didn’t hear about all the black folks who
had worked, done things and accomplished things.
“Down South, it was different,” he said. “You knew where you stood. Here, they
were grinning in your face and stabbing you in the back. Part of that was that
the competition for jobs was so intense. I probably didn’t get everything I was
capable of or earned, but I got lot more than a lot of other people.”
“Magnanimous and generous” indeed. A survivor of discrimination and a symbol for
what African-Americans could achieve when given a chance, Boggs credits the ABTP
with helping him navigate the racially charged corporate waters. Word of the
organization’s worth soon spread to other Northwestern Bell states, and a
tri-state alliance was formed with Nebraska and Minnesota. Chapters soon sprung
up in the Mountain States Telephone and Pacific Northwest Bell territories, and
when the AT&T divestiture took place in 1984, black managers in the newly formed
US West had a ready-made organization that was recognized by the entire Bell
System.
US West corporate executives embraced pluralism as a business strategy. Not only
did resource groups spring up for Pacific Islanders, Native Americans, gays and
lesbians, Hispanics, women, veterans and people with disabilities, the telephone
company’s diversity policy became a national model mirrored by other big
corporations, including Principal Financial Group Inc., Xerox Corp., General
Mills Inc. and The Walt Disney Co.
A Moral Path
Jack MacAllister, Northwestern Bell’s Iowa region CEO in the early 1970s and
eventually chairman and CEO of US West, is widely credited with cultivating an
atmosphere in which affirmative hiring was adopted not only as a way to comply
with the law, but also as an ethical business strategy that would strengthen the
company.
“He saw the upside. If we could unleash the talent embodied in people of color
and women, the company would be stronger,” said Ron James, an ABTP founding
member who went to work for the company as a manager trainee in 1971 and will be
the keynote speaker at the ABTP’s banquet Saturday.
James, who left the telephone company in 1995 as Minnesota CEO and vice
president of U.S. West’s Eastern Region, is one of the company’s diversity
success stories. He was one of the first African-Americans – and at age 34, one
of the youngest telephone company executives ever – to become a regional vice
president with responsibility for all marketing, sales and operations. Operating
units under his supervision were responsible for several billion dollars in
revenue, and half of Northwestern Bell’s workforce reported to the division he
headed. In 1988, Black Enterprise magazine named him one of the nation’s top 25
black managers, and he was cited as a rising star by Fortune magazine in 1989.
He currently is president and CEO of the Center for Ethical Business Cultures at
the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minn., where he assists companies in
creating ethical and profitable business cultures.
James said MacAllister was “way ahead of his time.”
“Without question in my mind, Jack was the key executive responsible for leading
the organization in that direction and get the entire Bell System to think about
it,” he said. “Even when [other executives] said there were other priorities, he
said this was the main thing we needed to be worried about.”
MacAllister, who was gaining a reputation as an aggressive risk-taker, did so at
some peril to his career at Northwestern Bell, which had a track record for
grooming future leaders for parent AT&T Corp. Despite civil rights triumphs over
the past decade, the atmosphere in the early 1970s remained racially charged.
“For Jack to stake his claim in this area, which was a view that was not widely
held, put his career track in jeopardy,” James said. “People took a wait-and-see
attitude: Is this going to blow up in Jack’s face, so to speak? Once you’ve said
you’re supportive and you’ve opened the door, when people who had been hurt
could talk about pain and also talk about opportunity, you don’t get love and
affection right away. What you get is this pent-up frustration and anger that
they’ve been forced to keep bottled up for so many years. Not being able to
better themselves comes boiling out at first, and once you get through that,
something far better can happen. Jack met that frustration early on and never
wavered.”
But even with MacAllister guiding the company along what he believed to be a
moral path, success wasn’t guaranteed for Northwestern Bell’s African-American
managers. James was placed with other rising stars on a management fast track,
the only African-American in his group.
“In one sense, it gave me good access,” James said, “but the stakes were higher
for me. I was in a special group of highly talented individuals, but in order to
rise above [color barriers], I had to double my output. There was a pretty high
burnout rate; less than half actually stuck it out, and of that half, very few
rose to become an officer. There were some African-Americans, but not many.”
MacAllister’s vision for a diversified workforce that would mirror the company’s
customer base helped establish a culture that allowed the new alliance for black
managers to thrive, James said. At the time the ABPT was formed, however, he and
his co-workers were more interested in succeeding in their new management roles
than in pioneering new ground on the civil rights front.
“I don’t think any of us approached it that way,” he said. “We had several
purposes. One, to create an environment that was safe for us to exchange
experiences we couldn’t [share] in the wider business community – things that
hurt us as well as things we were proud of. Two, it was a great networking
opportunity to share training, development and career opportunities that were
sometimes kept from us. We weren’t in the power circles. And three, it became a
way for us to have a common voice to talk to senior executives.”
Survival Kit
Affirmative hiring practices “terrified white America” in the 1970s, but
discrimination had gone underground, said Charles Zanders, who proudly calls
himself “a child of affirmative action.” As much as anything, he said, the ABTP
was a tool in black managers’ survival kits.
“No one was trying to be a hero or a radical; we just wanted to survive in this
white system,” said Zanders, who started with the telephone company in Waterloo
in 1971 and was the only African-American among about 150 installation and
repair technicians. He overcame initial resistance by fighting battles “one at a
time,” and in 1976 was promoted to a supervisor of installation and repair and
was transferred to Des Moines.
“We didn’t have any experience in supervising and training, and we had to
provide support to each other on how to manage people, most of our employees
being white people,” said Zanders. “If we were going to survive, we had to
[organize].”
Even cradled by the safety net of the ABTP, Linda Kaiser faced some of the same
racial tensions she thought she had left behind in 1975 when she took at job at
Northwestern Bell and moved to Des Moines from racially intolerant Sedalia, Mo.,
where African-Americans lived on one side of town and whites on the other. In
those days, a job with the telephone company was considered a career for life.
“Just to get into the telephone company was almost an act of Congress,” Kaiser
said. “Things seemed to be a little different, but once I got into the corporate
environment, I saw some of the same prejudices I thought I had left behind in
Missouri. They were just hidden.”
She was promoted to a management position in 1979 and found a strong mentor in
her white supervisor, Maurice Gilkinson. “After he retired, that’s when all
things broke loose,” Kaiser said. “I had a manager who did not care for me and
tried everything he could to get me out.”
She was transferred to a department that was being eliminated, with the promise
that her old job would be waiting for her when the close-out work was completed.
When she returned, three jobs had been consolidated into two. “I was the one
told that I didn’t have a job, after I was promised that I would,” she said.
Some of Kaiser’s co-workers urged her to retain an attorney, but she handled the
problem internally through the human resources division. She was without a job
for two months, but finally won it back through an internal appeal process.
Stress and pressure were her constant companions, and she recalls that “hardly
anyone would talk to me.”
Throughout it all, the ABTP was a lifeline “supporting me, guiding me in the
right direction and encouraging me to hang in there,” Kaiser said. When her job
was finally eliminated through downsizing in 1996, she retired early and took a
job with the Nyemaster law firm.
‘Our Pioneers’
Qwest Communications International Inc., which acquired US West in 2000, mirrors
those early efforts in its diversity mission statement: “At Qwest, our business
culture promotes mutual respect, acceptance, cooperation and productivity among
employees who are diverse in age, color, race, national origin, veteran status,
religion, sex, sexual orientation, ethnicity, marital or family status,
disability and any other legally protected category.” In 10 of the 14 states
Qwest serves, including Iowa, the percentage of African-American employees
exceeds the state’s census demographics. In Iowa, African-Americans make up
about 5 percent of Qwest employees, but account for only 2.1 percent of the
state’s population.
“They are our pioneers,” Rochelle Long, president of the Iowa chapter of the
ABTP and its regional vice president, said of the organization’s founders. “If
you are a person of color in America, you are not shocked [by their
experiences], and not just in corporate America. That was a time in America,
right after the civil rights movement, when [affirmative hiring practices were]
mandated, and it was kind of hostile.
The telephone company that is now Qwest has come a long way, she said, but there
are still corporations in America where African-Americans have failed to break
through the glass ceiling. “Discrimination is still here, but it’s more dressed
up,” she said. “People know how to work discrimination.”
James worries that some of the corporate doors opened through affirmative action
in the 1970s may be closing.
“A number of us raced through those doors and, frankly, we had good progress in
vertically going up in the organization and having good representation at
multiple levels, all the way the top,” he said. “In the ’80s, those doors
started to shut. You saw it in academics, you saw it in companies that weren’t
really committed, and the moment that legal pressure wasn’t there, their
energies trailed off.”
James said corporate downsizings in the 1990 disproportionately affected a
minority managers who had been promoted in non-core operations units through
affirmative hiring practices. “A gap was created when those who broke through in
the ’70s and had risen to the top and those in the middle were adversely
affected by cutbacks closures and downsizing,” he said. “Blacks are now
represented in frontline workers, but with a lessening interest on affirmative
action, and we need to get back to enough representation at the senior levels.
“If there’s anything I worry about, it’s that. If we’re not careful, we could
end up with a similar condition, although arrived at by a different means.”
He’s concerned, too, that young people who were not “products of the struggle”
may not share the same emotional attachment to the civil rights movement. “It’s
tough to tell somebody about the emotional attachment,” he said. “As
African-American elders, so to speak, we’re the ones with a legacy we have to
worry about sustaining. How do we pass that torch when they have different
motives and different drives? A big part is to try to meet them where they are
and make the connections. They don’t share the same angers that we perhaps did
because we experienced it firsthand.”
Through the organization they created, the legacy left by Orbie Boggs, Ron
James, Linda Kaiser, Charles Zanders and the other founders is brimming with
life. The ABTP’s face is racially diverse 30 years after its formation, and the
group now includes blacks, whites and Latinos, all joining together to hold the
common enemy of discrimination at bay. “We are in this together, and that’s not
new,” Long said. “It wasn’t just black people fighting for civil rights. It’s
never proper to shut doors to anybody.
“We have to keep reinventing ourselves. Originally, it was for networking and
support for each other, and we’re still building on that. It’s not the original
fight, but it’s still a struggle. In a lot of ways, they have made it possible
for us to sit here.”
Founding Members
Richard Bates
Orbie Boggs
Lee Brothers
Sylvia Dorsey
Art Green
Gretchen Hamlett
Larry Hawkins
Mae Henry-Ewing
Ron James
Linda Kaiser
Kitty Madison
Everett Mays
Ed McFalls
Marjorie Parker
Herc Payton
Charlotte Sargent
Bill Wells
Charles Zanders
© Copyright 2005 Des Moines Business Record. All rights reserved.
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