2009 is turning out to be quite a year of firsts. America’s first Black President was inaugurated on January 20th, followed by the nomination of the nation’s first Hispanic Supreme Court Justice on May 26th. And on July 1st, Ursula Burns became the first African American woman Chief Executive Officer of a Fortune 500 company when she took over the reins of Xerox Corporation. In addition to the fact that all three of these historic breakthrough achievers are people of color, I think it is also important to note that they all come from working class backgrounds, with parents who taught them through the power of example, the importance of education and hard work. Ursula Burns is a striking case in point.
Raised by a single mother in a lower East Side Manhattan housing project, Ms. Burns had already begun to defy the odds when she came to Xerox in 1980 as a mechanical engineering summer intern. Her extraordinary leadership skills were quickly noticed and after two decades with the company, she was named senior vice president of corporate strategic services in 2000. Seven years later, she was named president of Xerox and was elected to the company’s Board of Directors. On July 1, she succeeded Anne Mulcahy as CEO. Mulcahy, who is retiring, said, "The decision to move on is made easy only in the fact that Ursula Burns is so well positioned to take Xerox to the next level…Ursula takes on the leadership role in the old-fashioned way. She has earned it."
"Earning it" for Burns has not only meant working hard, it has meant rising up from poverty to achieve a level of success that was unthinkable for any person of color 40 years ago. According to a recent BusinessWeek article, "Three decades after women flooded into professional jobs, the C-suite continues to be dominated by men. While women make up 59.6% of the U.S. labor force, fewer than 16% of top corporate officers are female. For minorities, the figures are even worse. While other black women have run major divisions, Burns is the first to lead a large public company."
Burns grew up in a low-income housing project on Delancey Street in Manhattan, where, as she put it, "There were lots of Jewish immigrants, fewer Hispanics and African-Americans, but the common denominator and great equalizer was poverty." Her mother took in ironing and ran a day care center from her home to make ends meet and to scrape up enough money to send her three children to Catholic schools, where she felt they had the best chance to get a good education in a safe environment.
Always a math whiz, Burns went on to earn an engineering degree from the Polytechnic Institute of New York before earning her Masters from Columbia in 1981.
She has said, "My perspective comes in part from being a New York Black lady, in part from being an engineer. I know I’m smart and have opinions worth being heard."
We know it too. We congratulate her on being a first; we know she won’t be the last.
