Scott Wilson of S.M. Wilson
By Chris King
Of the St. Louis American
“We’ve been giving lip service to minority inclusion for a long time, and it isn’t changing,” said Scott Wilson, president of S.M. Wilson, one of the area’s most prosperous majority construction firms.
“So a number of us have decided to force the issue by requiring minority participation for ourselves on private-sector projects. We’re recruiting minorities where we never would have done before.”
Wilson name-checked Bob Clark, CEO of Clayco Construction, as an example of another leader at a majority firm who has made inclusion a priority. Yet, the name most important to Wilson’s personal commitment and that of his firm is a name that strikes dread in the hearts of many majority contractors: the activist attorney Eric E. Vickers.
Wilson and his company came up against Vickers last year over a set of construction projects for the Hazelwood School District. When Vickers first came to the S.M. Wilson offices to discuss minority participation on these projects, Wilson said Vickers “came loaded for bear,” a hunting metaphor for heavily armed and shooting to kill.
“He became abusive,” Wilson said, “and the meeting crumbled apart.”
After a brief tussle in the pages of the Post-Dispatch, Vickers and his colleagues picketed the Hazelwood superintendent’s office. When Superintendent Chris Wright appealed to Wilson to end the trouble, Wilson called Vickers. “I said, ‘Can we start over? Can we talk?’” Wilson remembered.
“He changed almost on the spot. Maybe I sounded almost whipped.”
Out of that meeting evolved a surprising friendship between a white majority contractor and a black activist lawyer. And minority inclusion on construction projects in St. Louis developed a new and well-positioned ally.
Wilson started by instituting an onsite workforce inclusion program for the Hazelwood projects, managed by Walle Amusa of A.D.E. Consulting Services, and paying for it out of the company’s pockets. “And that job was already bid and bought,” Wilson said. “Usually, once a job is let, it’s hard to raise minority participation on it. But we did.”
And Wilson’s way of thinking began to change. “Workforce inclusion programs are more important than I ever gave them credit for,” he said. “If we don’t create more minority craftspeople, they’ll never have a chance to have their own career and maybe start their own businesses.”
Wilson said, “It’s partly about faces on the job, partly about a living wage and it’s partly about planting seeds – I sound like a preacher, but I mean it – of full-blown minority-owned and -managed businesses.”
Wilson had a long way to go to get where he is. Though he was born in East St. Louis, he was raised in Granite City, Illinois, at a time when (he readily admits) the town prided itself in being all-white (give or take a few Hispanics). Then he studied liberal arts at Westminster College in Fulton, Mo., which “was also pretty white.”
When he went to work for the family business (started by his grandfather, Shouse McGarvey Wilson, in 1921), it was still based in Granite City. The company faced its own stigma, based on location – “Granite City doesn’t have a front door,” he laughed – so it opened its first St. Louis office in 1982 and is now headquartered in South City.
“Coming out of Illinois, trying to sell your services in Missouri is a battle,” Wilson said. “It’s pretty parochial. That ‘Where did you go to high school?’ stuff is real. And Granite City Senior High is not on the cool list.”
But Wilson doggedly took the company’s name around as a salesman, helping to contribute to a remarkable upgrade in its profile, from a low point of $26 million in gross annual sales to $450 million. He became its president in 1989 after five years in the field.
“I know what it’s like to fight an uphill battle,” he said. “I know what being broke looks like. I don’t know what being black is like.”
He appreciates the difference between being a struggling white business or worker and a struggling black business or worker in St. Louis. “Being black is different than being anything other than black,” Wilson said. “Around here, whether we admit it or not, it’s like having a target on your back.”
“If you keep your eyes open and read the paper, you get a sense there is inequity. Certainly, it’s observable in the construction field,” he said.
“Once I see a problem or hear about it, I almost always want to fix it, if I can. With minority inclusion in construction, it’s easy for me. My name is on the door.”
S.M. Wilson previously had done what was required, in terms of minority inclusion, and participated to the Stempel Plan, a mentoring program between majority and minority firms sponsored by the Associated General Contractors and the St. Louis Minority Business Council. Wilson has mentored Jimmy Miller of Miller Contracting though the program.
Still, before being challenged by Vickers, Wilson said, his company was simply going through the motions, like any other contractor. “Everybody knows the procedure,” he said. “You advertise, make a best-faith effort, and what you get (in terms of minority inclusion) is what you get.”
Now, he realizes, “all us white guys sitting around and saying, ‘I tried’ isn’t good enough.”
