We are excited this evening to celebrate the St. Louis American Foundation’s 4th annual Salute to Young Leaders. We host this event during a month set aside to celebrate black history, but this Salute is about our hopes and aspirations for the future. It will be exciting to see 20 of our brightest young professionals recognized before their peers, colleagues and family members – and even more exciting to watch them interact and begin to nurture new bonds that, we hope, will strengthen their respective support systems in a region that has historically been seen as challenging for high-potential young African Americans.
As we have become more acquainted with these young leaders, we have personally delivered the message that this event is intended to share publicly: that St. Louis is – now more than ever – a region where a committed, diligent, resourceful African American can succeed at the highest levels.
Last week we reminded our community that the board chair (Kelvin Westbrook) for the region’s largest employer (BJC) and the vice provost for graduate education (William Tate) for the region’s leading institution of higher learning (Washington University) are both African Americans. We might add that the nation’s most profitable black-owned business (World Wide Technology) was founded in St. Louis by an African American (David Steward) who hitchhiked here looking for opportunity with scarcely a dime to his name. All exemplify the discipline, drive and impulse control that have been essential to their professional and personal success.
We often talk bitterly about a glass ceiling. While we do not deny the enduring race-based disparities in this region and the holdover of many antiquated values in some of our corporate board rooms and offices of political power, the examples of these three African Americans show that the glass ceiling is not impenetrable.
Not to leave out the accomplishments of African-American women, who bump up against class ceilings of two types. Three of St. Louis’ citywide officials (Comptroller Darlene Green, Treasurer Tishaura Jones, License Collector Mavis Thompson) and two of its state senators (Maria Chappelle-Nadal and Jamilah Nasheed) are African-American women nurtured in the St. Louis region. And we could point to many other black women in St. Louis doing world-class work in the fields of medicine, law, education and business, not to mention the very popular forms of endeavor (entertainment and athletics) where we have come to take our transcendence for granted.
We very dearly hope that this event in particular and this newspaper in general help to foster an environment that nurtures more African Americans who rise to the top in their endeavors in St. Louis. We do not particularly care whether these young leaders are homegrown, like these women elected officials, or transplants, like Steward, Tate and Westbrook. We want to keep more of our most talented youth here, or entice them back after they study elsewhere and see more of the world. But when one of our universities or corporations or new entrepreneurial incentives entices a talented African American from a different region, we are just as interested in helping them find professional opportunities here where they can make a difference and then work to open up other opportunities for those who come behind them.
That final point is critical. Like everyone in the Black Press, we are much influenced by the example of Frederick Douglass, a fugitive slave who – after he gained his personal freedom – became an ardent abolitionist and publisher. We believe, as that great man did, that it is never enough to simply save your own skin or make your own fortune. As Richard Mark – the African-American president of Ameren Illinois – likes to remind young professionals, “It’s not about you. It’s about what you can do to help others.”
