A Letter to My White Friends and Colleagues

CHAPTER ONEWhy Should You Trust My Advice? Who Am I?

ON JUNE 1, 2019, the Boston Globe headline read “At Harvard Business School, Diversity Remains Elusive.”¹ The story was about my retirement from HBS, where I taught a course titled “Entrepreneurial Finance” and created a new course titled Black Business Leaders and Entrepreneurship in response to the absence of content about Black businesspeople in almost every course at the school. I left my alma mater in protest of this failing, frustrated and disappointed with its anti-Black attitudes and practices. Almost one year before retiring, I wrote a letter to Larry Bacow, the president of Harvard University. Here are some excerpts:²

• From: Rogers, Steven
• Sent: Wednesday, August 15, 2018 12:59 pm
• To: Bacow, Lawrence S.
• Dear President Bacow,

My name is Steven Rogers and I teach at the business school, where I am a Senior Lecturer. I have a pressing concern, but I'd like to begin with a short story:

On April 2, 1981, I was working as a purchasing agent at the North Carolina–based Consolidated Diesel Company (a $500 million joint venture between J.I. Case and Cummins Engine Company) when the plant manager told me he'd received a call from the director of the North Green Golf Club. The director informed him that I had lunch at the club, using the company's corporate membership, but in the future I would not be allowed to eat in the dining room because the club had a policy that forbade Black people from eating there. He said that ...