&ldquo\;Growing up, my family felt unusual empathy with black people.
Because my mother worked as a public health nurse'\;s aide, we got to k
now her black professional nursing friends. I grew up watching incomprehen
sible brutality against well-behaved black people in the South on TV. My p
arents had been direct victims of discrimination when they were younger. E
ven in my generation, attending schools dominated by members of other ethn
ic groups, I experienced more subtle forms of discrimination, including de
grading ethnic jokes from some classmates. I spent 30 years at Pitney Bowe
s, 11 years as CEO, because Pitney Bowes welcomed all kinds of people. Wal
ter Wheeler, its longest serving CEO, had been a National Urban League (NU
L) board member. Like Pitney Bowes, the NUL invited everyone, black, white
, young, old, male, female, Democrat or Republican, to aspire to the Ameri
can dream. I accepted the NUL'\;s invitation to join its Board in 1997,
became its chairman for five years, and served for 13 years. Both organiz
ations created and celebrated success stories for women and people of colo
r. \; In 2004, I discovered such a story. My younger son'\;s white
Swedish chess coach told me he had secured a golf scholarship to Tennessee
State University, a historically black college. The coach was a black wom
an by the name of Dr. Catana Starks. When she began coaching in 1988, she
fielded a black golf team, but was forced to recruit mostly or all white n
on-U.S. golfers after the mid-1990'\;s. \; This documentary tells h
er story."\;
\;
Michael J. Critelli is
CEO of Dossia, and the former Executive Chairman of Pitney Bowes Inc., a $
6.3 billion mailstream solutions company. During the 34 years since he com
pleted his undergraduate education at the University of Wisconsin and was
awarded a J.D., cum laude at Harvard Law School, he has had a distinguishe
d career as a company, industry, and community leader. \; As Executive
Chairman, Mr. Critelli led the Pitney Bowes&rsquo\; focus on the emerging
opportunities in the external environment, including postal reform and tr
ansformation in the U.S. and globally, and market opportunities arising fr
om the company'\;s innovation and leadership in areas such as health ca
re, government services and corporate social responsibility.
\;
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