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Climbing the Ladder

Kenneth Epps

I was born on May 29, 1956, in Lake City, South Carolina, in a four-room sharecropper’s residence.

The odds were long for a black male child born into those conditions at the time. Race relations were horrible, with atrocities against blacks by white citizenry – including the police – fairly commonplace. Segregation existed throughout the United States; it could be found at varying degrees across regions, from the extreme levels in the Confederate South to less draconian segregated housing in the Northeast. I remember seeing “Colored Only” and “Whites Only” signs labeling separate facilities in my youth. And just as race was used to designate the right to exist in particular places, it also determined the upward ladder of success.

This ladder, used through generations for the purpose of upward mobility, looked a lot different for black people. It was often missing the necessary rungs afforded to the white population: access to early childhood education, decent housing, easily obtained capital, higher-paying jobs, the ballot box, public office, and more. These absent rungs created gaps that many were unable to scale, regardless of how hard they might stretch and reach and strain. Structurally, this locked in enduring cycles of poverty in the black community at levels ten times higher than in the white community.

In addition to the dearth of resources, racial discrimination and violence against black people were so common and widely accepted that they hardly made the news. The only news of this sort in The New York Times on my birth date were two reprints from the previous day. The first was an article from the Tallahassee, Florida, newspaper about black residents boycotting the city busing system following the arrest of Wilhelmina Jakes and Carrie Patterson, two female college students. Wilhelmina and Carrie attended Florida A&M University, a historically black college (HBCU). They were arrested for refusing to sit at the back of the bus. The second article was a reprint from a newspaper in Baton Rouge about Louisiana State University, a majority white school, which had decided to uphold segregation. Specifically, the school decided against desegregating the athletic program and activities. This decision was met with a noticeable lack of protest by white students at LSU.

The young girls at Florida A&M were likely inspired by Rosa Parks’s refusal to give up her seat in the white section of the bus in Montgomery, Alabama, on May 12, 1955, an action that ignited the civil rights movement of the 1960s. This movement resulted in major legislation and social policies that restored rungs to the ladder and enabled the building of a black middle class in the United States for the first time in almost 400 years.

So, despite those long odds at my birth – and because of the sacrifices and love and support of so many before me, of all races – I was provided with a stepstool that shortened my odds and provided guardrails within which I could live a happy life.

Sixty-four years later, I retired to Charlotte, North Carolina, in the fall of 2019. We settled just a couple of hours away from the sharecropper’s residence where I was born and grew up. My goals and desires at the time for the remaining years of my life were fourfold:

First, I wanted to write my memoirs about my life’s struggles and how to live a happy life even when the odds are stacked against you.

Second, I wanted to help my beloved undergraduate alma mater, South Carolina State University, a historically black college and university (HBCU), survive. I wanted to help it continue to take in the neediest students from within the state and give them a fighting chance in life, as the institution had done for me.

Third, I planned to work to get my nephew, Gregory Cameron, released from the Florida State Prison where he is currently serving a seventy-year sentence. The sentence, disproportionate to the crime, was handed down under the brutal and racially-biased court system. Charged for stealing, he was labeled a habitual criminal and was subjected to Florida’s version of the infamous “Three Strikes and You’re Out” laws. These laws were implemented during the 1980s in an effort to lower the crime rate. None of Gregory’s stealing involved a weapon or violence, yet his sentence is longer than some crimes with those elements.

My last goal? To live the rest of my life out as happily as I could. In some ways, I had gotten started on all of the goals in one form or another.

And then it happened!

Covid-19 hit the nation with its disproportionate effects on communities of color. Then the country learned of the murders of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd. Ahmaud Arbery, a twenty-five-year-old African American male, was killed while jogging. He was hunted down by self-appointed white vigilantes, who had decided that he was burglarizing the neighborhood. Breonna Taylor, an African American EMT worker, was murdered in the middle of the night in her own home by police conducting a raid. They shot her eight times. George Floyd, an African American man, was murdered by the police for attempting to spend a $20 counterfeit bill.

Because these tragedies were caught on video during a time when a large portion of the country was under orders to shelter in place, the vestiges of 400 years of brutality, cruelty and social injustice against African Americans were laid bare for everyone to see. The scab was ripped off the wound. It revealed that the ladder was still incomplete. While the civil rights movement successfully added rungs that allowed black people to share in some aspects of the social and economic dreams, there was still a long way to go. The rungs were still smeared with the grease and slime of racism that often keeps too many African Americans in poverty.

So significant were these events that they dominated news headlines for weeks and are still the subject of headlines at the writing of this essay. Interestingly enough, the racially-oriented headlines on my sixty-fourth birthday were significant and represented in mainstream media nationwide:

Sadly, for most African Americans – and some other people of color – these headlines were not shocking at all. Most of us realize that racism is the yoke, the appendage that every African American child has to bear from cradle to grave, simply by the accident of birth.

So, where do we go from here, you might ask? I have triplets who are beginning to climb the ladder, and I pray that the yoke of systematic racism will end with their generation. In many ways, their challenges are the same as mine were, and in many ways, they are different.
What’s different? They did not grow up in the segregated South, in poverty. They did not attend segregated schools. They grew up in an upper middle class town with a 1.5 percent black population, attended majority white schools and colleges (my son attended Morehouse College, an HBCU). Their whole lives have been dominated by white experiences. To this day, I still question the wisdom of the choice to raise them in that environment.

What is the same? Systematic racism!

Sixty-four years later, they are still experiencing things I hoped would be gone by now. I have been profiled by the police on numerous occasions. During one stop, the police officer put me in a spread eagle on the highway and searched my car for drugs because I was driving with a taillight out. That was in New Jersey in 1986. As a ten-year-old, my son was profiled and questioned in California by the Pleasanton police in his front yard. The cause of suspicion? Retrieving an item from his mother’s car. That was in 2007. I don’t need to explain how disturbing that was for a ten-year-old.

Another instance – one of many – involved my daughter. One day, she came home from school crying because someone in her band said, “All black people are stinky,” so she must be the source of the foul smell. Or, on the more implicitly racist side, one of my son’s instructors asked me to encourage Jonathan to participate in a play, and said that if he did, he would get to kiss a white girl. He was actually smiling as he said it – until I unloaded on him. The list goes on and on.

Racism is structurally embedded in our society and it will take a long time for the rungs of the ladder to be cleansed of the slime. But it CAN be done. My hope – through this essay to my GSB ’85 classmates and my eventual memoir–is, in some tiny measure, to help with the erosion of systematic racism against African Americans while providing some guidelines to living a happy life.

To my GSB classmates: it won’t be easy but it starts with a few things.

First, self-examination. Accept that you have explicit and implicit biases and deal with them honestly. All humans have them. Speak out against racism wherever and whenever you see it, even when it’s uncomfortable to do so. Two, embrace the young generation, listen to them, and support them. They don’t have the overhead and baggage that we do. They are the ones who will save us. Use your enormous network to get people of color hired and appointed into private and public leadership roles, so they can drive corporate strategies, shape public opinion, level the playing field, and bring others up the ladder.

Finally, and most importantly, get out of your bubble and reach out to the least among us. Don’t just check the box with the black friend in your inner circle. Quite candidly, they don’t need your help. Reach out to that person who makes you uncomfortable, although you never directly had a reason to feel that way.

I was so excited to go to Stanford Business School because I wanted to learn from the best and learn with the best. I felt then as I do now, that Stanford was special because it somehow weeded out and found students who had more of a “purpose-driven” element to their lives. And as such, I felt that it would be a breeding ground for more social justice driven leaders to shape the landscape for generations to come. As America reckons with its racial past once again, I’ve been thinking back over the years and regret that I did not work harder while at the GSB and since then, to help my classmates appreciate the effects of systemic racism in the country. I am also somewhat disappointed that my classmates did not do more to understand it at the time and over the years.

That being said, the experience at the GSB is one that changed the arc of my life and one I will always treasure. I hope my GSB friends will embrace social justice in all aspects of their lives going forward. In the end, I pray that you will help someone, directly or indirectly, to get a shot to live out their dreams. Replace missing rungs. Clean the ladder of its grease. Help them climb.

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