Speeches and statementsRemarks to the 39th Annual Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Dinner & CelebrationPresident B. Joseph White Reverend Brooks, Senator Jones, Members of the Commission, Distinguished Guests: Thank you for this honor. I feel genuinely unworthy of receiving the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Excellence in Leadership award. Yet I respect and appreciate the decision by the Commission and its Select Committee.
So this evening, I accept this award mindful of, and with the intention of honoring, the millions who successfully overcome unfair and absurd assumptions of inferiority, who suffer slights and disrespect for no good reason, and who get ahead without a comfortable cushion of family wealth. My admiration for these people — many of whom are African-American — knows no bounds. And, I accept the award to remind all of us — in this room and beyond — who live in the United States and have good educations and positions of power that we are the luckiest people in human history and we have a sacred obligation. It is to use our privilege and power — some of it earned, some of it just plain dumb luck — to create an environment of respect, dignity and opportunity for the millions determined to better their lot in life — and their children’s — at a time of brutal global competition and, unfortunately, too much domestic indifference. I cherish this award for the simple reason that there is no leader in human history I admire more than Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. In my judgment, the three most important leaders of the 20th century were Gandhi, King and Mandela. All spoke truth to power. All challenged the conventional order. All put their lives on the line. All demonstrated that there is a power greater than either guns or money. All changed the world and lifted everyone in the process. Dr. King has been special in my life. He inspired me as a young man. And he has never been far from my thoughts in my years as a leader. The day I became dean of the University of Michigan Business School, I put his photograph on my wall. Someone came in, looked at it, and asked, “Did you do that for our black students?” I said, “No, I did it for myself.” Every time I faced a risky or unpopular decision involving justice or fairness or respect or increasing opportunity — and there were many of them — I was inspired by Dr. King and thought, “Just do it. This is a cakewalk compared to what he faced.” Since I moved to Illinois, a bust of Abraham Lincoln in my office in Urbana has provided the same inspiration. So — thank you for this award. I will cherish it forever. Before I go on, I would like to extend special recognition to several people here this evening: My wife, Mary, with whom everything is possible. Illinois Senate President, Emil Jones, and Secretary of State, Jesse White. Members of the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois: Trustee Frances Carroll I owe to them the privilege and responsibility of leading the University of Illinois. There, we do Nobel Prize-winning science, provide clinical care to the poor and educate 70,000 students a year, including 10,000 underrepresented minority students. I want to recognize the Chancellor of the UIC campus: Sylvia Manning. Professor Vernon Burton, Chair of the UIUC Faculty Senate. And, my assistant, Ms. Joyce Williams. Thank you, also, to many other colleagues, alumni and friends of the University of Illinois. And, of course, to all of you for being here. Now, Reverend Brooks gave me a tough assignment for tonight, but I like a challenge so let’s get to it. He asked me to talk about how, in the years ahead, many, many more African-Americans can earn a good living and become prosperous, wealthy and economically powerful. I felt a little concerned that this might not be an elevated enough subject for the King celebration, but several things have given me courage. First, Reverend Brooks is a man who walks his talk. He told me that he had recently given a sermon entitled, “Make God Happy: Become a Millionaire.” So he went first and if he can do it, I can do it. Second, people’s economic welfare has never been far from central in the thinking of great civil rights leaders. Remember what Dr. King was doing in Memphis on April 4, 1968. He was preparing to lead a protest march in support of sanitation workers striking to get a better wage. And I will never forget what Archbishop Desmond Tutu said to me when I met him in Capetown during a break in the hearings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. I said, “Now that apartheid has ended, what are your greatest challenges?” He said without hesitation: “Giving people tangible hope that their lives will improve — a new water pipe in a township, a chance for a job.” So, thank you, Reverend Brooks, for this worthy assignment. I want to begin with a story, because embedded in it is virtually everything I know about how African-Americans can become more prosperous, wealthy and economically powerful and do so on a large scale. It’s the story of Mannie Jackson. When I arrived at the University of Illinois in January 2005, I had half-written a new book called, The Nature of Leadership. After a two-hour lunch with Mannie Jackson in Phoenix in February, I had to rewrite Chapter 1 and put him in the center of it. Mannie Jackson was born in a boxcar. He grew up in Edwardsville, Ill., where his father was an autoworker. Mannie was a good student and basketball player, and on the strength of these achievements, he came to the University of Illinois in 1956. Over four years, he studied hard and played basketball well, becoming not only one of the first two African-Americans to play for the Fighting Illini, but also co-captain of the team and an All-American his senior year. After he graduated, Mannie just missed making it into the NBA because, if you can believe it, in those days there was a de facto quota on black players — about two per team. (How dumb a policy was that?) So he went to play with a team called the Harlem Globetrotters. Its famous owner, Abe Saperstein, took Mannie under his wing and since, in Mannie’s words, Saperstein was "the greatest promoter who ever lived," Mannie learned — prodigiously. Now the pace picks up. After 18 months with the Globetrotters, Mannie went to work for Honeywell Corp. in Minneapolis and had a great, 30-year career, rising to the top, running a big piece of the company. In the early ’90s, he left Honeywell and, guess what, bought the Harlem Globetrotters, the team for which he once played. He took a calculated risk, put together a plan, worked hard and successfully, and turned around the business as he described a decade later in a Harvard Business Review article entitled, “Bringing a Dying Brand Back to Life.” Last year, Mannie Jackson sold a share of the Globetrotters to private equity owners. He pocketed tens of millions of dollars and, today, he continues to head the business. Mannie has used his wealth the way many thoughtful Americans do. He is proud of how he treats his players and staff. He lives a good life. And he is philanthropic: a school building in Edwardsville carries his name, and he and I are discussing a major gift to the University of Illinois to enable us, as Mannie says, to be “a gateway to a life of achievement and success for thousands of kids like me.” Embedded in the Mannie Jackson story is most of what I know about how many more African-Americans — and, of course, all Americans — can become prosperous and economically powerful in the future. Get a good education. Use it and whatever other talents you have to get more education — the most and the best you can. Work hard. Learn from anyone who can teach you. Build your career the conventional way — like climbing the ladder at Honeywell or being a teacher or lawyer or doctor. Earn a little more than you spend, then be a smart saver and a financially literate investor. Or build your career the entrepreneurial way — by taking calculated risk, becoming an owner of a business or real estate, hoping and praying you get a little wind at your back, and growing the value of your equity. Or do both, the way Mannie Jackson did. If I have one message this evening, it is that today, in the global economy, the foundation of most personal prosperity is a good education, the more the better. About 85 percent of Americans graduate from high school, but only 30 percent from college — what I call the 85/30 gap. It is no accident that the top one-third of American income earners are doing quite well while the middle-income group is stagnating and the bottom one-third is dropping, tragically. The correlation between the one-third of Americans with college degrees and the one-third of Americans who are personally succeeding in the global economy — regardless of race or place or gender — is not perfect, but it is very, very high. This is because college graduates have 70 percent higher lifetime earnings and a one-third lower unemployment rate than high school graduates. And, by the way, they are more likely to vote, a good thing for our democracy. Good education, from preschool through college, is essential to people achieving their individual dreams and to America remaining a powerful nation and a land of opportunity. This has never been more true than today. Remember that Mannie Jackson’s dad was an Illinois autoworker at a time when more than one-quarter of the American work force was unionized. Today that number is less than 10 percent, and it’s mainly public employees. Without a good education, Mannie’s dad, like my Italian immigrant grandfather, was able to get a well-paying job in a manufacturing company, buy a house and put his kids through school. Those days are long gone. In America’s celebrity-saturated society, many kids mistakenly think they can grab the brass ring of wealth and fame with a God-given quality like athletic talent or singing ability or personal beauty. Most of them are as wrong as the people who think they’ll get rich by winning the lottery. We owe it to all young people to say, “Look, you’re going nowhere without a good education.” And then help them get it. Getting a good education is a special challenge for many African-Americans, and this is the single greatest obstacle to their becoming prosperous and economically powerful. Remember the 85/30 gap — the percentage of Americans who graduate from high school versus college? That’s for all Americans. For African-Americans, the gap is 80/17 … only 17 percent of African-Americans earn a college degree or higher. In Illinois, it’s actually worse — 77/15. And way too many African-American young people are starting college but not finishing — in Illinois, only one-third of those who begin college graduate within six years. This is tragic. Because the American opportunity machine — business, industry, the professions, universities — wants well-educated African-Americans — as well as Latinos and Asians and whites — more than ever before. How do I know? Because, when the University of Michigan defended its affirmative action practices before the Supreme Court of the United States, our best friends were the more than 50 American companies that filed amicus briefs supporting our case, as well as the U.S. military that testified that in a diverse democracy, well-educated leaders must come from every group in American society. I also know because every day, I meet African-Americans who are fully participating in the American dream. Virtually all have a good education. Like Desiree Rogers, my colleague on the board of Equity Residential and the President of People’s Gas and North Shore Gas. Erik Whitaker, the MD, and MPH Director of the Illinois Department of Public Health. Sheila Johnson, a U of I grad who continues her entrepreneurial work and contributes generously to the arts and education. And, Representative David Miller, a UIC-educated dentist and Illinois state legislator. People I haven’t met also demonstrate the opportunity that’s out there. Like the 449 African-Americans who serve as Fortune 500 board members. And the seven African-American CEOs of those companies, up from one in 1999. It’s still not enough — but it’s progress. I truly think it would warm Dr. King’s heart that the opportunities for African-Americans with a good education are nearly unlimited today. While racism is not dead and injustice continues in America, none of us should miss the profound meaning of the deep desire so many Americans had for Colin Powell to become president of the United States, and the palpable national excitement about Barack Obama — an excitement I share — that transcends party, regional and racial boundaries. But I think it would have saddened Dr. King that only a small proportion of African-Americans are getting the education they need to prosper. It saddens me. But it also outrages me and I want to change it. It is on this theme — outrage and change — that I want to close my remarks this evening. And challenge us all. For every leader, there is a what and a how of his or her work. The “what” of Dr. King’s work is well-known and well-remembered: ending discrimination, fighting injustice, combating poverty, bringing respect to the poor and dignity to the despised. But the “how” of Dr. King’s work has, in my view, been too quickly forgotten. It is viewed as part of a grainy image, black-and-white past, no longer relevant in today’s complex, full color, high-definition world. With this I disagree. Dr. King’s “how” was simple and unique and effective … and timeless. Combine a deep sense of outrage with a personal commitment to non-violent change. Let me repeat: combine a deep sense of outrage with a personal commitment to non-violent change. It was an approach that transformed our nation. This evening I assert, my friends, that for many more African-Americans to get the great education they need to become prosperous and economically powerful, we are going to have to rediscover in ourselves the capacity for outrage and a personal commitment to non-violent change. Let me explain. There are conditions in America today worthy of outrage, and I worry that we don’t feel them. That we have become used to them. Like:
My personal heroes have always been people whose sense of outrage remains acute throughout their lives and who find nonviolent ways to make things better. Because as Dr. King said, “Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.” There is a lot of silence in America today. So I admire enormously Dr. Gary Slutkin of the UIC School of Public Health, a medical doctor whose program, Ceasefire, treats gun violence as an epidemic that’s killing children and treats it in ways that reduces gun-related deaths by 50 percent in Chicago neighborhoods where it’s deployed. I admire a guy named Steve Mariotti who founded an organization called the National Foundation for Teaching Entrepreneurship (NFTE for short) that has taught tens of thousands of kids in city neighborhoods how to start and develop businesses with a constructive purpose instead of dealing drugs and destroying lives. I admire Wendy Kopp for creating Teach for America to marry up the idealism of educated young people with the desperate need for teachers in America’s cities and rural areas. I admire the Kalamazoo Promise, an audacious new initiative in my hometown that simply says to every single elementary and high school student in the Kalamazoo Public Schools, “if you stay in school and graduate, you’ll get a free college education.” I really think that each of us needs to feel outrage at those shortcomings of our society that deserve our outrage. We need to have a dream of how to make things better. And we need our own program of nonviolent action that can make that dream come true. Nonviolent action isn’t just sitting in at a lunch counter or boycotting buses. Today, it’s having the creativity and drive and tenacity to create organizations like Ceasefire or NFTE or Teach for America or the Kalamazoo Promise. Or maybe to raise hell about your local school and then pitch in and make it better. Or, perhaps, just to spend an evening when you’re exhausted helping a kid with her homework. In the 1990s, we had a dream at the University of Michigan Business School. It was to make our school the top choice for African-American candidates who wanted to earn an MBA in a top program. We achieved that goal and everybody won: all the students (not just the African Americans), the companies who hired them and the University.
I think that taking a great education to them — to working adults, single parents, underrepresented minorities and place-bound people of all kinds and for all kinds of reasons — is the single most important thing we at the University of Illinois can do to help those people get ahead, get prosperous, get powerful. Thank you — again — for this award of a lifetime. I look forward to linking arms with you to create a better future for all those who are depending on us. |
I accept the award this evening mindful of
the millions who travel through
life without my advantages. Frankly, being a tall, white American
man with a good education in this era carries with it a knapsack of
privilege and respect and opportunity that only a fool would deny. 
Now,
many of us have a dream at the University of Illinois. It goes beyond
maintaining and building the quality of the University of Illinois
as we know it today, though this is important. It is to make the University
of Illinois the national leader in bringing a high-quality, highly
affordable and accessible college education to tens of thousands of
able and motivated students who don’t have the personal freedom
to spend an extended time on one of our campuses.