“I was leaving Wisconsin when I had a rare opportunity to apply for a state job as a prison guard in Corrections,” Knox recalled. “That’s how I ended up in Madison. I took a job in Waupun as a correction officer. And I think a year later when they opened up Goodland Hall at Mendota where they kept inmates who needed psychiatric care. I got promoted and came over as a supervisor of correctional officers.”

That was the beginning of an 18-year career of state service. The first stop was at the Dept. of Natural Resources.

“The interesting thing is that I got into that work because when I was at Mendota, I got on their affirmative action committee where they were trying to attract more diversity to Mendota,” Knox said. “I found that rewarding. That allowed me to transfer into DNR as their equal opportunity specialist. They didn’t have an affirmative action officer at that time. I actually was doing more than specialist work, functioning as the affirmative action officer in a lower capacity. But one of the things that was interesting at DNR that I recall was there are two major employment groups, natural resource specialist and environmental specialist. And they had very little diversity in those two job areas.”

One of the reasons was centered on how they conducted their outreach.

“They were like, ‘Well, it’s hard to get people of color interested in natural resources,’” Knox recalled. “And I was like, ‘I don’t think that’s true. The diverse people I know go fishing, go hunting. They do all of that. It’s just a matter of you exposing them to what those natural resource careers are.’ I will give you an example. If you talk to young African Americans in Milwaukee, and you ask them about a lot of that stuff, they might tell you, ‘I want to be a veterinarian’ because they are familiar with dogs and cats. They may not be familiar with wolves and the wild animals. What I told them is if you expose them to those kind of careers, they will invariably have interest in those kinds of careers.”

It was a matter of bring the mountain to Mohammad. DNR specialized their outreach.

“We tried to create internships to expose more young people, primarily in the Milwaukee and Southeastern Wisconsin, to wildlife management careers,” Knox recalled. “The only other exposure that they had was seeing the warden when they went hunting or fishing. Other than that, they weren’t aware of all of the other wildlife management careers. And then on the environmental side, it was the same thing. Even people who live in large urban areas are impacted by air quality, air quality and all kinds of environmental issues. We should be exposing people to those issues that they are being impacted by. I remember Darrell Bazzell started some urban camping programs on the natural resources side. And so my family and an African family down the street, we were the guinea pigs who went up to Sand Hill, camped over a weekend and learned about the environment and how to camp. Really, we upped our examples of trying to recruit people in those areas. And of course, you always have other, law-enforcement type positions. I learned a lot in working with DNR. When people make assumptions about where people will work, it’s just a matter of exposing them to those opportunities. Then they can go to school, get trained and learn that position.”

Knox ended up transferring to the Dept. of Administration where he was  as an affirmative action officer/training officer/employee assistance program worker.

“It gave me the opportunity to go back and bring a lot of people with whom I was familiar and had experience and training into DOA and train employees on multicultural communication and other areas,” Knox said. “Fortunately, I knew enough of those people from previous jobs and my social network here in Madison where we could bring in people like John Odom and do some training for the department. Being the training officer helped me even more because I was responsible for coordinating the type of training that the employees would get. We started a program where regular employees could training to go on to supervisory and management positions. People had the chance to get executive training like at the Kellogg Institute and other places. The other thing we did was the Wisconsin Certified Manager Program. That’s a certification program for 300 hours that you can take. And we offered that to employees also so that they could up their management skills as well. As the employee assistance program coordinator actually gave me a good orientation to the issues that employees face when they are trying to work but they are being impacted by other issues and they need the employer to support them so that they can perform their jobs well. I looked at that as nine years of some real excellent experience in human resources type management work. We targeted persons of color so that they could move up through the ranks in state government.”

Knox was getting some heat in that everyone else was getting promoted except the people who worked under him. It was time to move.

“I went over to Health and Family Services,” Knox said. “Gladis Benavides was the affirmative action officer for that department. She kind of threw me a lifeline because people around me and in the area that I worked was personnel. We had payroll people, personnel people, human resources people who were getting promoted. But my section was not getting promoted by Employee Relations. Gladis offered me an opportunity to transfer over to Health and Family Services as the affirmative action officer over there, but also as the contract compliance officer. Gladis was doing 80 percent state work and 20 percent corporate training. She allowed me to assist her sometimes.”

After 18 years, Knox left state service when the Dane County first equal opportunity officer position was created and Knox was selected to lead it.

“Ken Haynes was the minority affairs coordinator,” Knox said. “He was in my office. Wesley Sparkman was our contract compliance officer. And Al Cooper was also in my office. I inherited a great office. People would ask, ‘How did you get an office of all Black people?’ I would respond, ‘Look across the hall. How did they get an office of all white people?’ It was ironic. And we added some other staff later like Colleen Clark. Originally Kathleen Falk was the county exec and eventually it became Joe Parisi.”

In the 17 years that Knox was with Dane County, he felt they put the county on the right track in terms of diversifying its workforce.

“I know there was a steady progress of increasing diverse employment,” Knox said. “It increased every year in different categories. What people need to realize is that it is one thing to increase your diversity at the entry level. But you also have to look at how many managers do you have? Can you get Black and Latino people promoted? One thing that you need to work on is making sure that you are creating the opportunities to develop those employees. Another thing that we had over at the county was that any time that we would go on a recruitment effort and we were underutilized for diversity and they were going to hire someone who was not meeting that diverse population, they would have to submit a justification request to my office. I would review that and make a determination on whether to approve that or not. The biggest part of that was you needed diverse applicants in the applicant pool as well as in each stage of the hiring process. And then in the end, if a manager was not planning to hire affirmatively, then they would have to submit that request to me for approval. I think that was a good mechanism to make sure that these managers were doing all that they could to hire affirmatively. We all know that people tend to hire people who are most like themselves. It’s just human nature. We have to make sure that they are thinking about hiring differently.”

While Knox moved to Madison in 1982, his family lived in the Allied Drive area and later moved to the Hammersley area. But South Madison beckoned. And he moved there in 1990.

Next issue: South Madison activism