By the time Orbie Boggs and his minority co-workers formed the Alliance of Black Telecommunications Professionals in 1975, nearly two decades of service to Northwestern Bell Telephone Co. (later US West Inc. and now Qwest Communications International Inc.) had already shown him discrimination’s ugly face. It had been naked and unshielded, brazen and ubiquitous. It had overlooked African-Americans, relegated them to cleaning up other people’s trash or providing other janitorial services, limited their chances to advance. Through the years, discrimination had proved itself to be a devious enemy of people who simply sought the same rights as their white co-workers.

Remarkably, it seems, the now-retired Boggs harbors no animosity. Negativity, he says, is a wasted emotion. Yet in his story is an important civil rights battle fought quietly in homogenous Des Moines, Iowa, where a group of African-American telephone company workers promoted by affirmative hiring practices formed the Iowa Area

Black Managers Association, later named the ABPT, to help them survive in a mostly white corporate culture. The ABPT, which celebrates its 30th anniversary June 10-11, spawned similar chapters throughout the former Bell System, and US West, one of the seven “Baby Bell” regional operating companies created by the breakup of the system, was cited nationally for its commitment to a pluralistic workforce.

Boggs’ first job with the telephone company in 1956 was in the service bureau, a port of entry into the sprawling Bell System for most African-Americans in those days. It was the same year buses in Montgomery, Ala., were desegregated after a year of boycotting and legal battles but also the same year 10 Southern members of Congress urged states to resist the 1954 Supreme Court ruling that declared segregated schools to be unconstitutional, seemingly incongruous developments demonstrating how deeply race relations divided America at the time. It was eight years before President Lyndon B. Johnson put his signature on the sweeping Civil Rights Act of 1964, landmark legislation that prohibited discrimination in public places, schools, lodging, federal programs and employment. Affirmative hiring as a strategy to improve workplace equality loomed far over the distant horizon.

In 1956 and the years following, bias against African-Americans took many forms, from the outright discrimination in a note passed from one supervisor to another containing words that still sting, “that I was jealous and kind of like other black folks, felt discriminated against,” Boggs recalled, putting himself back in the history of almost a half century ago, to the more subtle bias found in “We don’t look at you as being black,” the begrudging acceptance of a white co-worker when after Boggs was promoted to a management position.

“I am that,” Boggs said, a laugh punctuating the assertion as he put himself back in the present. “What they were trying to say was, ‘You’re just like me.’ I’m probably being more magnanimous and generous than I should be, but in looking at the people were dealing with, they had come from little towns where there were no black people and they didn’t hear about all the black folks who had worked, done things and accomplished things.

“Down South, it was different,” he said. “You knew where you stood. Here, they were grinning in your face and stabbing you in the back. Part of that was that the competition for jobs was so intense. I probably didn’t get everything I was capable of or earned, but I got lot more than a lot of other people.”

“Magnanimous and generous” indeed. A survivor of discrimination and a symbol for what African-Americans could achieve when given a chance, Boggs credits the ABTP with helping him navigate the racially charged corporate waters. Word of the organization’s worth soon spread to other Northwestern Bell states, and a tri-state alliance was formed with Nebraska and Minnesota. Chapters soon sprung up in the Mountain States Telephone and Pacific Northwest Bell territories, and when the AT&T divestiture took place in 1984, black managers in the newly formed US West had a ready-made organization that was recognized by the entire Bell System.

US West corporate executives embraced pluralism as a business strategy. Not only did resource groups spring up for Pacific Islanders, Native Americans, gays and lesbians, Hispanics, women, veterans and people with disabilities, the telephone company’s diversity policy became a national model mirrored by other big corporations, including Principal Financial Group Inc., Xerox Corp., General Mills Inc. and The Walt Disney Co.

A MORAL PATH

Jack MacAllister, Northwestern Bell’s Iowa region CEO in the early 1970s and eventually chairman and CEO of US West, is widely credited with cultivating an atmosphere in which affirmative hiring was adopted not only as a way to comply with the law, but also as an ethical business strategy that would strengthen the company.

“He saw the upside. If we could unleash the talent embodied in people of color and women, the company would be stronger,” said Ron James, an ABTP founding member who went to work for the company as a manager trainee in 1971 and will be the keynote speaker at the ABTP’s banquet Saturday.

James, who left the telephone company in 1995 as Minnesota CEO and vice president of U.S. West’s Eastern Region, is one of the company’s diversity success stories. He was one of the first African-Americans – and at age 34, one of the youngest telephone company executives ever – to become a regional vice president with responsibility for all marketing, sales and operations. Operating units under his supervision were responsible for several billion dollars in revenue, and half of Northwestern Bell’s workforce reported to the division he headed. In 1988, Black Enterprise magazine named him one of the nation’s top 25 black managers, and he was cited as a rising star by Fortune magazine in 1989. He currently is president and CEO of the Center for Ethical Business Cultures at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minn., where he assists companies in creating ethical and profitable business cultures.

James said MacAllister was “way ahead of his time.”

“Without question in my mind, Jack was the key executive responsible for leading the organization in that direction and get the entire Bell System to think about it,” he said. “Even when [other executives] said there were other priorities, he said this was the main thing we needed to be worried about.”

MacAllister, who was gaining a reputation as an aggressive risk-taker, did so at some peril to his career at Northwestern Bell, which had a track record for grooming future leaders for parent AT&T Corp. Despite civil rights triumphs over the past decade, the atmosphere in the early 1970s remained racially charged.

“For Jack to stake his claim in this area, which was a view that was not widely held, put his career track in jeopardy,” James said. “People took a wait-and-see attitude: Is this going to blow up in Jack’s face, so to speak? Once you’ve said you’re supportive and you’ve opened the door, when people who had been hurt could talk about pain and also talk about opportunity, you don’t get love and affection right away. What you get is this pent-up frustration and anger that they’ve been forced to keep bottled up for so many years. Not being able to better themselves comes boiling out at first, and once you get through that, something far better can happen. Jack met that frustration early on and never wavered.”

But even with MacAllister guiding the company along what he believed to be a moral path, success wasn’t guaranteed for Northwestern Bell’s African-American managers. James was placed with other rising stars on a management fast track, the only African-American in his group.

“In one sense, it gave me good access,” James said, “but the stakes were higher for me. I was in a special group of highly talented individuals, but in order to rise above [color barriers], I had to double my output. There was a pretty high burnout rate; less than half actually stuck it out, and of that half, very few rose to become an officer. There were some African-Americans, but not many.”

MacAllister’s vision for a diversified workforce that would mirror the company’s customer base helped establish a culture that allowed the new alliance for black managers to thrive, James said. At the time the ABPT was formed, however, he and his co-workers were more interested in succeeding in their new management roles than in pioneering new ground on the civil rights front.

“I don’t think any of us approached it that way,” he said. “We had several purposes. One, to create an environment that was safe for us to exchange experiences we couldn’t [share] in the wider business community – things that hurt us as well as things we were proud of. Two, it was a great networking opportunity to share training, development and career opportunities that were sometimes kept from us. We weren’t in the power circles. And three, it became a way for us to have a common voice to talk to senior executives.”

SURVIVAL KIT

Affirmative hiring practices “terrified white America” in the 1970s, but discrimination had gone underground, said Charles Zanders, who proudly calls himself “a child of affirmative action.” As much as anything, he said, the ABTP was a tool in black managers’ survival kits.

“No one was trying to be a hero or a radical; we just wanted to survive in this white system,” said Zanders, who started with the telephone company in Waterloo in 1971 and was the only African-American among about 150 installation and repair technicians. He overcame initial resistance by fighting battles “one at a time,” and in 1976 was promoted to a supervisor of installation and repair and was transferred to Des Moines.

“We didn’t have any experience in supervising and training, and we had to provide support to each other on how to manage people, most of our employees being white people,” said Zanders. “If we were going to survive, we had to [organize].”

Even cradled by the safety net of the ABTP, Linda Kaiser faced some of the same racial tensions she thought she had left behind in 1975 when she took at job at Northwestern Bell and moved to Des Moines from racially intolerant Sedalia, Mo., where African-Americans lived on one side of town and whites on the other. In those days, a job with the telephone company was considered a career for life. “Just to get into the telephone company was almost an act of Congress,” Kaiser said. “Things seemed to be a little different, but once I got into the corporate environment, I saw some of the same prejudices I thought I had left behind in Missouri. They were just hidden.”

She was promoted to a management position in 1979 and found a strong mentor in her white supervisor, Maurice Gilkinson. “After he retired, that’s when all things broke loose,” Kaiser said. “I had a manager who did not care for me and tried everything he could to get me out.”

She was transferred to a department that was being eliminated, with the promise that her old job would be waiting for her when the close-out work was completed. When she returned, three jobs had been consolidated into two. “I was the one told that I didn’t have a job, after I was promised that I would,” she said. Some of Kaiser’s co-workers urged her to retain an attorney, but she handled the problem internally through the human resources division. She was without a job for two months, but finally won it back through an internal appeal process. Stress and pressure were her constant companions, and she recalls that “hardly anyone would talk to me.”

Throughout it all, the ABTP was a lifeline “supporting me, guiding me in the right direction and encouraging me to hang in there,” Kaiser said. When her job was finally eliminated through downsizing in 1996, she retired early and took a job with the Nyemaster law firm.

‘OUR PIONEERS’

Qwest Communications International Inc., which acquired US West in 2000, mirrors those early efforts in its diversity mission statement: “At Qwest, our business culture promotes mutual respect, acceptance, cooperation and productivity among employees who are diverse in age, color, race, national origin, veteran status, religion, sex, sexual orientation, ethnicity, marital or family status, disability and any other legally protected category.” In 10 of the 14 states Qwest serves, including Iowa, the percentage of African-American employees exceeds the state’s census demographics. In Iowa, African-Americans make up about 5 percent of Qwest employees, but account for only 2.1 percent of the state’s population.

“They are our pioneers,” Rochelle Long, president of the Iowa chapter of the ABTP and its regional vice president, said of the organization’s founders. “If you are a person of color in America, you are not shocked [by their experiences], and not just in corporate America. That was a time in America, right after the civil rights movement, when [affirmative hiring practices were] mandated, and it was kind of hostile.

The telephone company that is now Qwest has come a long way, she said, but there are still corporations in America where African-Americans have failed to break through the glass ceiling. “Discrimination is still here, but it’s more dressed up,” she said. “People know how to work discrimination.”

James worries that some of the corporate doors opened through affirmative action in the 1970s may be closing.

“A number of us raced through those doors and, frankly, we had good progress in vertically going up in the organization and having good representation at multiple levels, all the way the top,” he said. “In the ’80s, those doors started to shut. You saw it in academics, you saw it in companies that weren’t really committed, and the moment that legal pressure wasn’t there, their energies trailed off.”

James said corporate downsizings in the 1990 disproportionately affected a minority managers who had been promoted in non-core operations units through affirmative hiring practices. “A gap was created when those who broke through in the ’70s and had risen to the top and those in the middle were adversely affected by cutbacks closures and downsizing,” he said. “Blacks are now represented in frontline workers, but with a lessening interest on affirmative action, and we need to get back to enough representation at the senior levels.

“If there’s anything I worry about, it’s that. If we’re not careful, we could end up with a similar condition, although arrived at by a different means.”

He’s concerned, too, that young people who were not “products of the struggle” may not share the same emotional attachment to the civil rights movement. “It’s tough to tell somebody about the emotional attachment,” he said. “As African-American elders, so to speak, we’re the ones with a legacy we have to worry about sustaining. How do we pass that torch when they have different motives and different drives? A big part is to try to meet them where they are and make the connections. They don’t share the same angers that we perhaps did because we experienced it firsthand.”

Through the organization they created, the legacy left by Orbie Boggs, Ron James, Linda Kaiser, Charles Zanders and the other founders is brimming with life. The ABTP’s face is racially diverse 30 years after its formation, and the group now includes blacks, whites and Latinos, all joining together to hold the common enemy of discrimination at bay. “We are in this together, and that’s not new,” Long said. “It wasn’t just black people fighting for civil rights. It’s never proper to shut doors to anybody.

“We have to keep reinventing ourselves. Originally, it was for networking and support for each other, and we’re still building on that. It’s not the original fight, but it’s still a struggle. In a lot of ways, they have made it possible for us to sit here.”

ANNIVERSARY HIGHLIGHTS

Friday, June 10

6 p.m., Fort Des Moines Memorial Park: Kickoff and fund-raiser, including announcement of a scholarship named in honor of ABTP founding member Charlotte Sargent.

Saturday, June 11

7 a.m., A.H. Blank Golf Course: Golf Classic

6 p.m., Downtown Marriott: Banquet with keynote speech by ABTP founding member Ron James; dance following.

FOUNDING MEMBERS

Richard Bates

Orbie Boggs

Lee Brothers

Sylvia Dorsey

Art Green

Gretchen Hamlett

Larry Hawkins

Mae Henry-Ewing

Ron James

Linda Kaiser

Kitty Madison

Everett Mays

Ed McFalls

Marjorie Parker

Herc Payton

Charlotte Sargent

Bill Wells

Charles Zanders