He sat across my desk in complete silence, but with the biggest grin on his face when I incredulously asked, “Did you really use an axe to collect your money from a general contractor?” I had heard the story many times. In fact it was a legend in the construction industry: how he, being one of the group of seven of this area’s biggest black contractors back in the 70’s and 80’s, had got so fed up with not being paid either on time or right on his painting subcontract on a major project that he literally went up in the office of the general contractor, unannounced, with an axe to collect his money.
His frustration that day of now over a decade ago, unfortunately, remains. But he has joined four of the others in moving on. Ether Bledsoe passed last week, a muscular man who stood ever erect at well over 6’’ feet tall, and even taller as an entrepreneur. His enduring fight against the throes and forces and circumstances faced by minority businesses stands as his legacy and his challenge to our community.
Ironically, last week also marked the public unveiling by PRIDE of St. Louis – a collaboration of the contractors and labor unions that dominate St. Louis’ construction industry – of its formation of a minority business incubator program. The brainchild and leader of this effort is the dynamic and irascible leader of the metropolitan area carpenter’s union, Terry Nelson, who stated in announcing their incubator idea, “I believe that in the last 20 years, we’ve had easily more than 100 minority contractors on construction projects in the St. Louis area. I can name on one hand those who are still around.”
Ether’s frustration was in witnessing the capabilities of minority firms being wasted by this community, which Terry acknowledged in observing: “We have failed miserably in our attempts for minority and woman-owned companies to participate in the construction industry.”
Ether, who founded and headed one of the first minority construction firms to have annual revenues in the millions, was a testament to that truth, having experienced first-hand as a black businessman discrimination in being denied access to financing, bonding, private sector work – and even a minority workforce because of union racism.
He, along with the other six, also courageously founded the St. Louis Minority Contractors Association to fight against this exclusion through a strategy that combined demonstrations, litigation, and negotiation. Ether, a true soldier in the cause of inclusion, used the profits from his business to help fund the lawsuit brought by SLMCA, which established in 1990 the city’s still existing policy of 25% minority and 5% female participation on all city contracts.
As Ether’s earthly life was ebbing last week, across town, at a meeting hosted by a prominent minority contractor, a stately black businesswoman rose from her chair and said to the United States Senator who had been invited to speak: “We have been talking for over 20 years about the problems of minority businesses getting capital and financing; why hasn’t anything been done about it?”
For all the suffering and stress Ether and the other six had to endure to succeed as minority contractors in this town, we owe it them to not let the next twenty years be like the last.
