Client:
Milton Irvin, Managing Director, UBS Securities
Project:
Speech to a professional organization, November 2004, “What Can Whitney M. Young Jr. Teach Businesses in the 21st Century?”
My Role:
Eleven years after I wrote his powerful speech to the National Black MBA Association, Mr. Irvin tracked me down and asked me to write for him again. He was speaking at the 31st anniversary of a conference he had helped to organize when he was a student at Wharton Business School in the 1970s. The conference was named after civil rights leader Whitney M. Young, Jr. – who was quite a speaker himself. I found a speech Mr. Young had given to the American Institute of Architects in 1968 and was so impressed with it that I used it as the backbone of this speech. (If you’d like to read Mr. Young’s speech, email me and I’ll send you a copy.) Here are three excerpts from the speech I wrote.
Second Excerpt

But before I talk to you about MY travels in the business world since 1974, I want to talk a little about Whitney Moore Young, Jr.

I know you know some things about him. The Conference Web site has a page with his biography, and it talks about his groundbreaking work with the National Urban League during the turbulent years of the 1960s. The Web site notes that he wrote – quote – “Full participation of minority groups in the American business community is the key to strengthening the fiber of our society.”

Clearly that kind of forthright statement was one of the reasons we named this conference for Whitney M. Young, Jr. We wanted to make a statement about African Americans participating fully at Wharton and beyond.

And while we haven’t achieved “full participation” in the business world quite yet, I don’t think anyone would argue that we haven’t come a long way in the last thirty years. Certainly Ken Chenault and Dick Parsons and Stan O’Neal and Ann Fudge are a testament to enlightened progress. As Vernon Jordan has noted, these leaders are today CEOs of companies that would not have let their parents get anywhere near the Boardroom – except, maybe, to clean it...
> First Excerpt > The Conclusion of the Speech > Next Speech
       

ELAINE BENNETT
Bennett Ink LLC

Box 213 Maplewood, NJ 07040
Phone: 973.763.1932

elaine@bennettink.com