Urban League of Greater Madison President/CEO
Scott Gray and economic empowerment
Monetary policies

By Jonathan Gramling

Part 1 of 2

It didn’t take Scott Gray, president/ceo of the Urban League of Greater Madison, very long to see what the lay of the land was here in
Madison. Gray took the reins of the Urban League in 2005 and it didn’t take him long to see the disparities. While poverty and the ills
that affect the African American community might be invisible to many Madisonians, through his work at the League, the problems
are plainly visible on a daily basis.
“I’m from Milwaukee which is probably stamped ‘the blue-collar town’ of America and I just see a total difference between Milwaukee
and Madison,” Gray said during an interview at the Urban League offices on Gorham Street. “And not having the history of Madison, I
imagine there were a few manufacturers, but this is a town that seems to me that has been more about service, more about the
university, more about all of these high tech types of businesses more so than what you first think about Wisconsin in terms of
agriculture and manufacturing. Madison doesn’t strike me as a town that has focused a whole lot on those kinds of things.”
Gray is a former businessman who is leading the Urban League into a new era. While once it worked on almost every problem the
African American community faced, it now has focused its efforts under the umbrella of economic empowerment. “You can narrow
our agenda down to three things, which are workforce development, college readiness and career development and wealth
accumulation,” Gray said.
Gray takes a soft-spoken business approach to analyzing the African American’s problems and forging solutions that lead to long-term
economic growth and empowerment in the community. Take, for instance, is view on job placement activities. While job placement
has traditionally been looked at as referring people to jobs and then almost forgetting about them, Gray views it as part of the
productive process, as the development of people to be a part of the workforce.
“A lot of our folks go to jobs, last for a month and find themselves not liking the job, leave the employer hanging and then coming
back to us to say that they want to find another opportunity,” Gray said. “We had to stop that because it just wasn’t adding value to us.
It wasn’t adding any value to the employer. And that’s what the Urban League has to do. We have to add value to all of our
partnerships. So not only do we want to get folks into job opportunities that are family sustaining, but we also want to provide retention
services in making sure that when we send someone to an employer that it’s going to be the right fit and the person has figured out all
of the barriers that have prevented them from being in the workforce and making sure child care and transportation have been figured
out day one. We think that is a value-added relationship. We don’t want to take job orders over the fax machine saying a company
needs 20 people tomorrow. We want to sit down with employers and develop a real relationship.”
When Gray talks about the challenges that face the African American community, his eyes turn toward the children. And he sees a
disconnect with them as it relates to the society at large that will more than likely leave them disconnected as adults — and outside
the economic mainstream. “They are coming from generations of poverty,” Gray said. “And it seems that we have gravitated more
toward instant gratification, you know, the NBA or watching videos or playing music. And we build our hopes and dreams on those
things when, at the end of the day when you look at NBA players, almost 60 percent of them who have retired are broke. We have not
really said to ourselves that we really need to figure out how to get to that next level through education.”
And right now, they just aren’t getting it through the education system. “Our kids aren’t getting the education they need to compete,”
Gray emphasized. “When you see that our kids aren’t even prepared to go into high school, when they are only testing at 60 percent
proficiency for reading and 45 percent for math, that shows the disconnect right there. For a lot of the jobs we are talking about here
in Madison, you need to be proficient in both of those things. And if our kids aren’t proficient moving into ninth grade, that shows the
disconnect right there. What we are finding is that our kids are starting to drop out in the late ninth grade and definitely in the tenth
grade. We have a 40 percent drop out rate here in Madison. And I suspect it comes a lot from not being prepared to be in high
school. A lot of these kid, once they get around their peers and they see that they can’t read or they can’t keep up in some of these
subjects, it’s tough for them to survive in high school. And the peer groups just provide so much pressure and they are tipping students
the wrong way in the African American community. We are not pushing each other to look at math and reading as being fun and
things we should be working at to build our intellect and build our capacity.”
Gray feels that African American students need to learn why they are going to school in the first place and what the payoff will be if
they strive to get an excellent education. “In Madison, what I have noticed is that we haven’t brought that type of intellectual capital
into the classroom, the UWs and Epic Systems of the world, these merging, growing companies that are looking for highly skilled
people every day of the week,” Gray said. “We aren’t getting those types of companies into the classrooms where our kids have no real
knowledge about what it would take to be a microbiologist or what it would take to be a computer programmer or what it would take to
be a pilot or any of these occupations that would require you to be able to read and understand math. So we have a lot of work to do
in that area. I feel like school systems — and this isn’t just the Madison school system — have the same education going on that my
mother was part of and perhaps her mother was a part of. It doesn’t feel like we are in a school system that is hands-on, that is real
time and brings the emerging sectors into the classroom.”
The educational process isn’t the only thing that is failing the children, in Gray’s view. There are also a lot of Bill Cosby type
admonitions for the African American community to do a better job in raising the children in Gray’s world view. “Somehow in the
African American community we just don’t have the highest expectations for our kids,” Gray emphasized. “Our kids are thinking about
how they go from middle school to the NBA or becoming a music star while other kids are thinking about being what their dads or
moms are doing. We need to start setting the expectations if we want our kids to achieve. We need to put our arms around this as a
community and figure out how we can bring this real-time expertise into the classroom to see that the X-Box and getting home to
watch BET or whatever, is not the most important thing. The most important thing is reading for a number of hours and doing your
math and going out to do community service. We need to talk more about it. I think no one person is to blame for this. I think we’ve all
missed the boat on this and now we need to figure out what we need to do for our kids, for this next generation. And it has to be better
than we did for the last generation.”
“We have to start figuring out how we can get folks from elementary through middle school through high school to get this track going
to move folks to bigger and better opportunities,” Gray continued. “Going to college isn’t just a dream. It should really be a reality if
you want to be a productive citizen and have a great career and be able to support a family here in Madison.”
And that, from Scott Gray’s business-oriented perspective, is the bottom line for Madison’s African American community.
Urban League of Greater Madison President/CEO
Scott Gray