The 2017 National Urban League Conference will come to St. Louis July 26-29, with Centene Corporation – led by CEO Michael Neidorff, who chairs the National Urban League’s Board of Directors – and World Wide Technology, led by founder and chairman David Steward, the title sponsors.
The American talked to Marc Morial, president of the National Urban League, about what to expect when the conference comes to town, how the Urban League is responding to the disruptions of the Trump presidency, and what he thinks about Confederate monuments coming down in his hometown of New Orleans, where his father, Ernest Nathan “Dutch” Morial, was the first black mayor, 1978-1986.
St. Louis American: What will people in St. Louis experience when the Urban League national conference comes here?
Marc Morial: We’re glad to be in St. Louis for the second time in 10 years. We continue to celebrate the tremendous work of the St. Louis Urban League, now under Michael McMillan’s leadership, and previously under the leadership of Jim Buford, who is a St. Louis icon, and also remains involved in the work of the national Urban League as a member of our Board of Trustees. So we’re celebrating their incredible presence and work in St. Louis.
Secondly, St. Louis is the home of our board chairman, Michael Neidorff, who’s really stepped up to ensure the success of this conference, and has assembled great support from the business and civic community in St. Louis for our conference.
Third, and this is probably the most important part for the people of St. Louis, our conference is not just a conference for visitors. Our conference is a conference for St. Louis. By that I mean that we have tremendous opportunities for people to participate in an empowerment experience.
So we have a career fair, and a jobs fair that will take place with companies, not only in St. Louis but from all over the country, who will be at our conference recruiting. We have a college fair that takes place for high school students and their parents. It involves colleges from all over the nation, including colleges in St. Louis, who are recruiting students, along with resources for financial aid and scholarships. Thirdly, we have what I would call “expo hall,” or the “Annual Empowerment Experience,” where there are companies, organizations, associations who want to connect with people in St. Louis around the products and services or the work that they do in the community. So in connection with that, on Saturday we’ll have Family and Community Day, and we’ll be giving away thousands of backpacks to kids to help them prepare to go back to school in the fall.
So in addition to the thought leadership events and the plenary sessions and the panels, there is a distinct and very important way for people in St. Louis to participate. And all of the things I described – the career fair, the expo hall, the college fair—are free and open to the public.
St. Louis American: What dollar amount would you assign the value to our local economy of having this conference here?
Marc Morial: About $10 million – a $10 million impact, which is a significant impact. And let me tell you that the value of the Urban League Conference, which we can measure, it’s hard to quantify, media and social media and media impressions. That conference generates more attention in the media than any other similarly situated conference. So it’ll generate a lot of presence in St. Louis, but it’ll generate tremendous traffic on the internet. And the traffic on the MSNBC, CNNs of the world.
St. Louis American: I’ve heard you call the St. Louis Urban League affiliate the “flagship affiliate.” Is that still how you would describe it?
Marc Morial: They are absolutely one of the very best affiliates in the country, the only affiliate that has scored a 5-star rating on all of its previous performance assessments. We’ve been doing performance assessments on all of our affiliates for the past 15 years, and St. Louis is the only affiliate to get 5 all three times that they’ve been assessed.
What they have been able to do in St. Louis is serve tens of thousands of people in multiple locations, in multiple programmatic areas, as well as serve as a social justice and civil rights voice in the community.
I’m impressed that they’ve been able to transition their leadership from Jim Buford to Michael McMillan, who has not lost a single step, and who has begun to build a new facility out in Ferguson, which underscores the fact that the national Urban League is not just there when protests take place – we stay, and we build, and we work, and we try to empower the community.
St. Louis American: Speaking of Ferguson, do you think that’s left a lasting impression, or was that just a major bump in the road a few years ago?
Marc Morial: I think Ferguson is bigger than Ferguson. Ferguson exposed poverty, it exposed disenfranchisement, it exposed police-community relations and police misconduct. It exposed a lot of things that were not specific to or peculiar to Ferguson. So we talk a lot about the Ferguson effect.
However, I think that there is going to be a lot of interest by people to find out, now that Ferguson was three years ago, in what has happened since Ferguson. How has the community responded? What steps have been taken to try to make life better? What political reforms have taken place? What community reforms, what police reforms have taken place?
It will be a chance for St. Louis to talk about those sorts of issues, while understanding that deep-seated poverty and police-community relations remain difficult issues and challenging issues, not just in Ferguson but the entire region. But I think people want to hear, in effect, where are things now?
St. Louis American: And you think that’ll be discussed when you guys are here?
Marc Morial: Yeah, we have a forum that’s going to take place with an opportunity to discuss that. And we’re going to put a big spotlight on what we’re doing. Michael MacMillan’s facility in Ferguson, the Save Our Sons Program, his effort to bring social service agencies together, is a very important component. And Michael Neidorff building a facility that put hundreds of people to work in Ferguson. These are constructive responses that we’ve tried to engineer. So we like to not only be diagnostic, we like to be prescriptive.
St. Louis American: By Neidorff’s contribution, you mean the Centene call center in Ferguson?
Marc Morial: Yes. And you know, he could have decided, after what happened in St. Louis, what happened in Ferguson, to move it to someplace else. But he leaned in and said: I have confidence in the community, I know we can put people to work, and I’m going to go right to Ferguson, and I’m going to do it. And I think that’s a great example of enlightened business leadership.
St. Louis American: Some people say it’s an unprecedented time on our national political scene, with this incredibly disruptive president. What does it mean to do an Urban League national conference at this time of this administration?
Marc Morial: It means that we must protect our progress and we must resist the rollback. So we continue to be constructive, but we are aligned in resisting any effort to roll back civil rights protections, roll back investments in education and workforce and housing, roll back the Affordable Care Act. We’re going to resist any effort to strip agencies of their ability to enforce civil rights laws, because that’s what our mission is. We must resist.
While at the same time, we take the position that if Congress decides to put forth an intelligent infrastructure plan, we will work with them to ensure that it benefits our community. And we’ve put together our own infrastructure plan, called the Main Street Marshall Plan.
So we’re going to be focusing on the work we need to do in these difficult and challenging times. We’re in it for the long haul, we’re in it for the long run, and notwithstanding the presidency and what’s happening in Washington, there’s a lot of work that takes place on a local level that Urban League affiliates are involved in. Places like Miami and Lexington, where we’re building new housing, where we’re standing up new programs. Places like New Orleans, and Atlanta, where we’re doing re-entry programs, and helping people who were formerly incarcerated get work.
St. Louis American: Speaking of New Orleans. I know we scheduled this call around your going home. What were your reflections on Mayor Landrieu’s bringing down all the Confederate monuments in NOLA?
Marc Morial: I say bravo and congratulations, the man is sticking to his guns. Those monuments probably should have come down – well, they should never have been put up in the 1880s. They were put up as part of an effort to snub the Reconstruction movement, they were part of the resistance to the Reconstruction movement. And I give him tremendous credit, and the City Council, which voted six to one to enable him to do that. I mean, I tell people my father, who was mayor in the seventies and eighties, tried to take down one of those monuments in 1979. And the City Council blocked him. So it takes not only the will of the mayor, it takes the support of the City Council.
St. Louis American:We just brought down the Confederate monument in Forest Park here after a similar process, so we were glad to see it go down.
Marc Morial: Those monuments, they don’t represent folks. I tell people, the Confederate leaders were treasonous. And secondly, they were losers. Who puts up monuments to losers? They’re monuments to losers. Treasonous losers. And those monuments have been up for a hundred years.
For more information on the 2017 National Urban League Conference in St. Louis, visit http://conference.iamempowered.com.
