Anthony R. James, 2004 Black Engineer of the Year, President and CEO Savannah Electric Southern Company

The individuals profiled here have shown amazing talent, verve, and innovation in their quest to be the best in technology, and it should surprise no one when they rise to the top.

But, as earlier black pioneers knew -- 50, 100, 200 years ago -- without a mandate, change would not have come. Even the science crowd -- who should have known better -- had bowed to prevailing American inclinations to ignore the talents of those whom social scientists Kardiner & Ovesy called "The People Who Walk in Darkness":

Benjamin Banneker, who had made America's first clock and whose "almanacks" rivaled Ben Franklin's, challenged Thomas Jefferson about whether Blacks such as himself could be "civilized." Banneker played a critical role in laying out the national capital at Washington, D.C., but died unable to vote.

George Washington Carver, freed from slavery by the Civil War, had to go North for college and returned one of America's greatest agricultural researchers, also discovering innovative industrial uses for farm products. Segregation hardened the year Carver went to work, and Blacks' industrial opportunities were shrinking, not expanding.

This year's Black Engineer of the Year, Anthony R. James, grew up in the South as lawsuits, demonstrations, and violence attended segregation's bitter end, and landed in a "social experiment." Procter & Gamble had a multicultural work force in its Southern plant, and James learned to live in a different world.

The Southern Company also learned. It hired and promoted James, changing views inside and outside the company, to everyone's benefit. Now he is the first-ever black CEO in the business community of Savannah, a city whose capture by the Union helped end the Civil War.

All of that could be repeated for each of this year's winners, innovators and leaders all. Without serious, sustained effort, diversity dies, and unimaginable talents are lost to the country Jefferson, Washington, Franklin and, yes, Banneker, Houston, and Marshall built.

2004 Black Engineer of the Year
Anthony R. James
President and Chief Executive Officer
Savannah Electric
Southern Company

Anthony James reveiews a map of Savannah Electric's distribution system with Bill Jones, manager of Reliability

As the summary in his award submission package says, James grew up under difficult circumstances: Among other things, his father lost an arm in an accident, and his family fell on hard economic times. Even worse, however, was the social environment in which the young James matured. Here is how the Southern Company executives who nominated James put it: "Growing up in the 1960s South was frightening and unpredictable. Social change was inevitable; the unrest surrounding the changes was troubling." But the young Anthony James "was luckier than many of his classmates, because he was encircled by the support of his caring parents; a benevolent scoutmaster, Anthony's mentor; and a charitable, compassionate community."

The turbulent years of James' youth were marked by the mass demonstrations, violent attempts at repression, lawsuits, and federal intervention that ended racial segregation in James' home state of Florida and the rest of the South.

Early Similarities

A century earlier, Jim Crow segregation's mores and practices had been instituted, during the discordant aftermath of the Civil War and Reconstruction, and the young Lewis Latimer grew up in similarly "frightening and unpredictable" circumstances. Latimer, the draftsman-engineer who helped Alexander Graham Bell patent the telephone, was too young to understand the infamous Black Codes that began the institutionalization of Southern segregation. He lived in New York, after all.

But even New York City was not immune to upheaval; Latimer's family probably witnessed the "Copperhead Riots" that had marked the refusal of Northern whites to submit to the military draft and fight to free the slaves. Latimer, undeterred by the hostile climate of his times, grew up to become the Edison Electric engineer who built the first Central Office power plants, wrote the manual for their maintenance, trained the crews who built them, and supervised the wiring of the cities of New York, Philadelphia, London, Toronto, and Baltimore during the 1880s and '90s.

Turning the Corner

Anthony James matured during the years when segregation was being dismantled. Forced to work after school by his father's disability, he developed a work ethic second to none. His internship at Kennedy Space Center and his five-year tenure in Procter & Gamble's multicultural work force in Albany, Ga., opened his eyes to the possibilities of life in an open society where he could be judged by the strength of his abilities and the content of his character, rather than the color of his skin.

By contrast, Latimer and Granville T. Woods, inventor of the railroads' lifesaving induction telegraph; Garrett Morgan, inventor of the gas mask, automatic traffic signal, and much of the apparatus of electric mass transit; and Julian Abele, designer of the Philadelphia Museum of Art and one of East Coast's principal architects in the 1890s, were demonstrating Blacks' capabilities in technology even as the Supreme Court was refusing to enforce the U.S. Constitution in Plessy v. Ferguson. With this ruling, the court denied the right of African Americans to stand on an equal footing in American society, even as pioneers such as Abele, Morgan, and Woods were demonstrating to that society the benefits of more equal treatment.

Moving for Change

Fortunately, however, by 1973, when P&G hired James, the young University of South Florida engineer, for its then-radical experiment in diversity at a paper-products plant, Plessy had been overturned.

In five years, James moved through six positions, winning promotions faster than anyone in the history of his division. Then, he decided to move to another company rather than stay at P&G and move across the country.

That was fortunate for Southern Company, parent of Savannah Electric, as well as for James and his family. In 1978, James started as safety and health supervisor for a Georgia Power Company plant, and his managers rapidly became aware of his ability to integrate engineering insights, his own raw talent, and what the company called "his exceptional people skills, positive power of persuasion, and determination to excel as an engineer, an innovator, a leader, and a mentor."

Steadily rising through the ranks, James was named maintenance superintendent at Georgia Power's Plant Scherer, then assistant plant manager at the McDonough-Atkinson plant, then employee benefits manager for the company, before moving to assistant to the senior vice president of Southern Company's Wholesale Power Marketing Division. Southern Company then made him plant manager for the Arkright and Scherer facilities. That Scherer facility, built less than a decade before James took it over in 1996, was the largest coal-fired power plant in the U.S., and James retained managerial responsibility for it when he was promoted to vice president for Power Generation and senior production officer for Savannah Electric, and central cluster manager for Georgia Power Company.

Weight on His Shoulders

In that dual position, James managed five major generating facilities, including the big coal-burner and a combustion-turbine peaking plant located inside a major defense facility.

In May of 2001, James' Southern Company superiors named him president and CEO of Savannah Electric, and the city of Savannah welcomed its first black corporate CEO with proud, open arms.

The ghosts of the turbulent past through which James arose were long laid to rest, and if the ghosts of Lewis Latimer, Granville Woods, and Julian Abele had been around, they all would have beamed for joy.