Ambition in Black + White. Melinda Marshall
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father had often told her, “Excellence of performance will overcome any obstacles created by man.”
And in the footsteps of her father she might well have continued. But she felt a growing disconnect between her daily reality “in the ivory tower,” and the lived experience of those in the black community around her. Ten years after the riots following the 1968 death of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Washington, DC was a predominantly black city surrounding a white Capitol Hill. “I had some responsibility, as an African American,” she says. “So I left science and went into public life.”
Drew Jarvis was elected to the Council of the District of Columbia to fill a vacated seat in 1979; for the next five terms, from 1980 to 1996, she won reelection to that seat. In 1981, she began her nineteen-year tenure as chair of the Council’s Committee on Economic Development. In 1982, she made a valiant attempt to unseat Mayor Marion Barry. With each campaign, she says, she summoned the courage she’d seen her mother demonstrate. “It was gutsy for me to run for public office when I hadn’t been in city politics at all,” Drew Jarvis reflects. “It was gutsy to leave science and a career for which I had trained to be in the public domain and help address economic vitality problems. And it took a lot of guts to push back, not just on Mayor Barry but also on his administration. I had two little children and a husband at the time. I said to my mother, ‘This is a little gutsy! I need you to help me over the next six months.’ And she did.
“But I was sure I would prevail,” Drew Jarvis continues. “The way I thought of it was, if you set your sights on doing something—and I saw the end goal as really important—then you can succeed. Or as my mother often said, ‘Just put one foot in front of the other.’”
Four years before the end of her last term on the Council, Drew Jarvis set her sights on transforming Southeastern University, an institution founded by the YMCA that was in danger of losing its accreditation. Drew Jarvis saw it as a vital bridge for black businesspeople who knew all about the service they intended to provide, but not the art of doing business—and who lacked access to capital. She saw they might acquire the know-how and the connections they needed if, through Southeastern, they were matched with larger corporations. “So I took over the institution,” she says, “and did both jobs as legislator and president for four years.” She oversaw Southeastern for nine years before it merged with another institution.
Social goals were paramount in every role she ever held. Even at the NIH, she got involved in minority recruiting, to attract more women and people of color to get into research. “No matter where I was, I was always thinking, how am I advancing people of color?” she observes. “I realized you needed to be at helm, so I looked to be in that position.”
Ever eager “to play in the field I was in,” Drew Jarvis was determined never to present as a threat, racially. “I wanted outcomes to be equivalent in terms of my own performance,” she says. “And because I was conscientious and determined to make a good outcome, maybe I didn’t experience the same things as other black women. But I could never be sure I was being evaluated in the same way. And I was afraid the outcome would reflect that.” Reflexively she tried to minimize the likelihood of being judged according to stereotype. She recalls a visit to the University of Maryland bookstore where her conversation with the cashier prompted him to say, “Your English is so precise, are you a teacher?” Drew Jarvis realized she had enunciated every word so as not to be perceived, as a minority student, to be lacking in education. “The unconscious things you do, to avoid the stereotype threat,” she muses. “I always assumed white people would assume I was not able to compete.”
While stereotypes continue to drive unequal outcomes, she says, momentous change is afoot. “We’re in revolution in this country with respect to visibility,” she observes. “Blacks have a long history of invisibility. Not antagonism, but invisibility. And it seems to me, a curtain has been pulled back. There are many in the white community saying, ‘I didn’t know; I didn’t understand; I didn’t see. Now I do.’” As a result of what’s become more visible, Drew Jarvis feels that the country may be on a path to greater equity. “People with good intentions have engaged in unconscious biases that have led to outcomes that may look the same as deliberate malevolence—and they’re realizing that,” she says. “Gradually, it’s changing.”
Like the public sector, education was an avenue to combat the stigma of race: black women who could afford it began to pursue higher education in greater numbers in the 1970s and ’80s, with the integration of schools and the rise of black universities.25 Yet, even with a college degree in hand, black women still tended to be employed in jobs that offered little in terms of career advancement or income growth.26 For example, in the field of clerical work—a “pink collar” career that only became accessible to black women in the latter half of the twentieth century—black women were vastly overrepresented in low-skill, low-pay occupations, such as file clerk and keypunch operator.27 And this despite the likelihood, as our interviewees observe, that these black women held college degrees.28
History Maker: Geri Thomas
In the summer of 1970, between her freshman and sophomore years at Georgia State University, Geri Thomas applied for temporary jobs at three businesses: a retail establishment, Southern Bell Telephone and Telegraph Company, and Citizens and Southern National Bank. Thomas got offers from all three companies. She accepted the bank’s offer, which was to work in operations, managing people’s accounts. “I’m going to have to straighten my hair,” Thomas, who wore a large Afro, remembers telling her mother.
She kept her Afro. She also stayed on that fall. Thomas would, in fact, stay on at the bank for the next forty-five years, working her way from operations at Citizens and Southern to global chief diversity officer at what became, through a series of mergers, Bank of America. When Thomas retired from the bank in 2016, it was as a business leader—the first woman in her family, and among the first black women of her generation, to be in business, let alone to be an executive in a multinational corporation.
None of that was apparent to her that summer of 1970, however. Racism was rampant, despite the legal protections afforded by the Civil Rights Act of 1964. While black people worked at the bank, they didn’t hold supervisory roles, despite the fact that many had college degrees. “Men and women who were white didn’t have degrees, the chief credit officer didn’t have a degree,” she says, “so that was an aha moment: clearly the standards were different.”
Racism had constrained her parents’ career paths, even though her mother was college-educated. Middle-class black women could be leaders in education or health, as head nurses or school principals, provided they worked in all-black hospitals or schools. Because her mother, a teacher, worked outside the home, Thomas never doubted she would, as well; and because racial barriers were lifting, she saw no reason to limit her aspirations. “My sister and I, we both decided, no way are we going to teach!” Thomas recalls. “That was hard, that was a twenty-four-seven job! Working nine to four in a bank looked good. And when I went to work at the bank? It reinforced what I’d always believed—that I had the intellectual ability and drive to succeed no matter what other people thought black people could and could not do.”
The challenge initially, she reflects, was logistical: to make it all work, she put her studies at Georgia State on hold temporarily, instead investing her time in getting to know her white coworkers and managers—not by suppressing her opinions when asked, but by saying what she thought. “I had a reputation for speaking my mind,” she says. “At my retirement party, that was something everybody noted: you could count on Geri to be utterly straight with you.” But back then, she remarks, it was easier for black and white people to be forthright with each other. “We went to parties at each others’ homes,” she points out. “We invested in getting to know each other, socially and culturally. We could ask questions. We’d talk about everything, and no one felt threatened.” Many of the white people she invested in getting to know back then, she says, wound up at her retirement party last year; she went to their children’s weddings, and they attended her children’s weddings. She just doesn’t see people forging those kinds of relationships today. “There was more of a willingness, back then, to put yourself out there and be authentic,” she reflects.
Her investment