“When I graduated from UW-Madison and went to the UW Placement Office, they sent me to two places in Madison,” Harris recalled. “One was with the city and one with the county. UW-Madison had a program where they placed graduates. I had my letters. I didn’t have my transcripts yet. When I went to the first place with Dane County. When I went in, she wouldn’t even get up to look at me. I told her who I was and I showed her my letter. She called the superintendent and she came out. She went back in and called the police. When the police came, she met me and said, ‘We don’t hire colored people. They must have made a mistake.’ So I called back to UW-Madison. She told me to go to the city. I went there. The secretary looked up and said, ‘We don’t hire colored people. Our staff wouldn’t want it.’”

Eventually Harris moved to Chicago to find employment, but returned later to become the director of the South Madison Neighborhood Center and became an activist through groups like the Madison Urban League and eventually worked as an affirmative action officer for MATC.

“When I was on the board at the Urban League, I was there with a guy by the name of Pat Richter,” Harris said. “Pat had a job with Oscar Mayer. He said, ‘Richard, we should get Jim Graham for executive director to start looking at the fact that Black people are not being employed in high positions. I said, ‘Do tell.’”

Since that time, studies have been conducted on African American unemployment and poverty. And while there are African Americans employed in visible positions within the public and private sectors, which make it appear that African Americans are engaged in all strata of society, what is the reality behind the appearance.

“As an African American, I was aware of “the Tale of Two Cities” — White Madison and Black Madison,” said William “Bill” Greer. “The former was perennially placed in the top ten of best places to live in the country and the latter was perennially placed in the bottom ten. The bleak outlook for African American children was described in the Wisconsin Council on Children and Families’ “Race to Equity” report. The racial disparities for adults have been chronicled by Dr. Ruben Anthony, Reverend Alex Gee, and Dr. Jack Daniels among other African American community leaders and advocates.”

And Harris wanted to know the truth of the matter.

“It was really Richard Harris’ idea,” Sternberg said about the group’s survey of area employers. “He had written a book years ago about growing up in South Madison as a Black person. He mentioned at one of our gatherings that African American employment isn’t what it should be in terms of the higher positions. And so he was made the chair of the committee. Bruce Thomadsen, Bill Greer, Denise Gotautis and I joined and worked for the last few years on this project. And then the survey itself has been going on the last full year. It was important because we wanted to see whether African Americans were getting opportunities to be managers and executives and administrative hires throughout private businesses, government, and university.”

“I talked to Jerry about the group getting involved in looking at the number of Black people who were not employed in higher-level positions,” Harris said. “Bruce said that we should not only look at private businesses, but also at public institutions like UW-Madison. He said that UW-Madison, according to what he saw, didn’t do too well in the hiring of Black people. This group has been tremendous. We’ve been working with each other for a good 2-3 years. When we did the study — Bruce Thomadsen is the straw that stirs the milkshake — Bruce had the ability to get the information that we want back and then he can massage it so it comes out. We were not amazed at the low percentage of Blacks employed in high level positions.”

While many people, especially in the African American community, knew that there were inequities as it related to hiring African Americans in upper echelon positions anecdotally — much like common knowledge about the educational disparities that African American children experienced — it takes a scientific study that documents the condition to spur community action on the problem.

“In order to get all of the surveys by electronic means, we had to have an email address to address someone,” Thomadsen said about the circulation of the survey. “We had the group — I didn’t do this — call people, businesses that were listed in one place or another. I even drove around different parts of the city to try to get names of businesses that we could look up and call to get an email address. We contacted around 1,650 businesses one way or another. We thought this would be beneficial in getting responses. We would talk with them and a lot of them would say, ‘We aren’t interested.’ That cleared those. We didn’t need to send them anything. And the ones who gave us an email, we thought, would be more interested. We contacted them and they knew that something was coming and be more likely to respond. We got responses from 187 businesses out of approximately 1,650. That was actually, for a survey, isn’t bad. The preparation work may have actually yielded some good there. And between them, it covered around 75,000 employees, so we got a good sampling of employees in the area.”

The results of the survey, for the most part, confirmed common perceptions about the phenomenon, in both the private and public sectors

“We found that businesses, in general, even in employing African Americans in any context, were below the percentage of African Americans in the population, which is about 6-7 percent,” Thomadsen said. “But once you got to management or executive positions, and board of directors, they just weren’t there. In fact, when you look at the numbers in the table, they actually look a little bit better than what you would think from the responses because there were a few employers who hired a lot of African Americans. We assume they are Black-owned businesses. And that artificially raised those numbers. It was an anomaly, anomalous points here and there. And you can tell that something like that is going on because if you just look at the median, it is pretty much zero in the upper reaches of businesses.”

And with Dane County and city of Madison governmental units serving as an exception, the results in the public sector weren’t much better.

“In governmental bodies, in which a lot of the employees are employed by some governmental body, outside of Madison, there are very few African Americans anywhere,” Thomadsen observed. “And again, the median is zero all the way across. Madison was a bright spot. They had employees in supervisory positions and professional positions above or equal to the percentages in the population. Dane County was a bright spot. When you look at the state of Wisconsin and the Federal Government just in the Madison area, it’s pretty dismal. In the state and federal government, between all of them, about three-quarters are professional or administrative positions. Only a quarter are non-professional. Yet half of the African Americans they employ are in the non-professional. That was surprising. The fact that the VA had only 1-2 percent of their administrators as African American, I thought was a bit surprising. I thought they may be doing better.”

Even in education where it is critical for children to see themselves in the people who teach them, the results were disappointing.

“For education, once again, Madison, Fitchburg and Sun Prairie had better results than everyone else,” Thomadsen said. “Everyone else was done at the 1-2 percent. For teachers, it was pretty much zero. Even in Madison, Sun Prairie and Fitchburg, the fraction of the teachers who were African American never exceeded three percent. A half of a percent was doing pretty good. That obviously is not a desirable situation because whether the students — in the Madison school district it’s about 12-13 percent African American — are Black or white, they don’t get the experience of seeing African Americans in a professional teaching role. That’s the highlight of what we found.”

The group coming into the survey thought diversity plans would make a difference.

“We tried to make a correlation between businesses that had a diversity plan and those that didn’t and did that make any difference,” Thomadsen said. “The answers were that it made a little difference in actually hiring some African Americans. But it didn’t make much of a difference when you look for hiring executives and administrators. That same thing held mostly true in municipalities and in school districts, there was absolutely no correlation whatsoever.”

While there were some signs of encouragement, for the most part, it was business as usual and African Americans were not part of the business

Next issue: Interpreting the results