These challenges might, as Washington said, make success sweeter for the few who overcome them. And their lived experience at work is demonstrably worse even than that of other people of color. They are less likely than their white peers to be hired, developed, and promoted. However, according to both quantitative and qualitative data, working African Americans - from those laboring in factories and on shop floors to those setting C-suite strategy - still face obstacles to advancement that other minorities and white women don’t. And several Black billionaires and CEOs sit on the respective ranking lists. Companies are committing to and investing heavily in diversity, because more corporate leaders acknowledge that it makes good business sense. Civil rights laws have been passed and affirmed. Has that dream been realized? Having spent the past 20 years conducting and reviewing research on African Americans’ advancement, particularly in the workplace, and having collected our work and others’ into a book, we must report that the answer is partly yes but mostly no. He hoped today’s Black leaders would find easier paths to success. And yet we must also assume that he, along with millions of other freedom fighters, wanted future generations of Black Americans to suffer fewer hardships.

He surely believed there was satisfaction in struggling against and surmounting bad odds. He was proud of what he and his peers had achieved. Washington, the educator, author, activist, and presidential adviser, wrote those words more than a century ago as a way of encouraging his African American compatriots - many of them recently emancipated from slavery - to persist in the fight for equal rights and economic opportunities. “Success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which has overcome while trying to succeed.”īooker T.

Color brave meaning