by Herman Cain
Lenora Davis and Luther Cain, Jr., were married in Ohio. They moved back to Memphis for a short period of time, and I was born there on December 13, 1945. My brother Thurman came along eighteen months later, and we soon moved to Atlanta, because Mom’s folks were from Stone Mountain, in the greater metropolitan area. Mom was homesick and moving there made her happy. Besides, Atlanta was a much more promising city than Memphis for job opportunities, and Dad was going to find other work, which he did.
Dad was not only the head of our family, but also the head of our extended family. Many of his friends sought his great common sense advice or came to him when they were down on their luck, or in trouble. He had a natural, motivating, competitive spirit, and even though he sometimes thought he was “the only man in the arena,” he always had compassion for other people.
He became a deacon in our church and it was not long before he was asked to become chairman of the Deacon Board. Then he joined the choir—possessing a natural gift of stage presence, he became a lead singer—and it was not long before he ended up being its president.
My dad was also a big-time Brooklyn Dodgers fan. When they brought Jackie Robinson on, many baseball fans in America became instant Brooklyn Dodgers fans. Then when they moved to LA, my dad was heartbroken. It wasn’t the same because even though the Dodgers had national appeal, they were from Brooklyn, and they were losing their identity.
My very first memories were of when my brother and I were little boys—Thurman must have been about four; I was five—and we were living in an apartment at the end of a building in what we called “the Projects,” government-supported housing downtown, on Gray Street, not two hundred yards from where the Convention Center now stands.
I can remember attending Gray Street Elementary School, up the street from the Projects. One day, our teacher told us, “You’re not getting the same education as white students.” When she said that, I really didn’t get mad. I just decided: Okay, I know that, but I’m still going to work as hard as I can to succeed, despite the fact that the white kids have better materials and better books.
My attitude then—as it is to this very day—was that you take a seemingly impossible goal and you make it happen. That was one of the many lessons I learned from Dad: He never allowed his lack of formal education to be a barrier to his success. And he never allowed his starting point in life or the racial conditions of his time to be excuses for failing to pursue his dreams. Dad taught me the value of having dreams, the motivation to pursue them, and the determination to achieve them.
That value made it possible for me to contemplate running for president. Some people don’t think I can get elected; they don’t think I can be an effective president. But as my wife, Gloria, will tell you, “The first thing you do in order to inspire Herman to do something is just to tell him ‘You can’t do it.’ Then, get out of his way!”
I gave my first speech at our church. I was eight years old and I can still recall my first words: “I wish my parents would stop talking about who I look like.” I lost my first election in the seventh grade. It was for class president. Five years later, as a high school senior, I ran a second time, having been urged to do so by some of my classmates who recognized leadership qualities in me before I did.
There is a latter-day parallel of sorts: In 2004, I ran in Georgia for a Senate seat but lost that election. Now, seven years later, I’m out there campaigning for the Republican Party’s presidential nomination! There’s a message in that time-frame between defeat and success!
It wasn’t easy to raise a family in the segregated Atlanta of the 1950s and 1960s. Dad wanted a nice house and a nice car and to put away enough savings to provide for Mom in the event of his death. But, above all, he wanted to put Thurman and me through college.
I’ll never forget the day when I was in fourth grade that we moved from the Projects to our house on Pelham Street, three rooms of a six-room duplex I called “the half-a-house.” Life was hard, but decidedly better there than before. To make ends meet and still have the hope of making a better life for Thurman and me, Mom worked as a maid and Dad worked three jobs: as a barber, as a janitor at the Pillsbury Company, and as a chauffeur at the Coca-Cola Company.
Dad worked all three jobs until he could make it off of two jobs; then he worked those two jobs until he could make it off of that one job. That was a typical experience shared by many Americans.
Mom and Dad were able to achieve their dreams because we didn’t have government in the way as much as it is in the way today. And Dad was so well thought of at Coca-Cola that he eventually became the private chauffeur to Robert W. Woodruff, the corporation’s chairman and CEO. Dad’s job was demanding, being on call whenever Mr. Woodruff was in town, but he was not required to accompany his boss on out-of-town trips, so he was able to spend time with us, to guide us, and to offer us glimpses of corporate life.
I relished those moments. While we were financially poor, we were emotionally rich, and our hard-working parents taught us lessons in dignity, ambition, and the value of formal education. Dad didn’t have the opportunity to earn a college degree, but I always tell people that he had a Ph.D. in common sense, and that he had graduated with honors—cum laude.
Dad developed much of his philosophy of life and learned a lot working for Mr. Woodruff, who was an inspiring personality. He was a good businessman, a risk-taker, and very benevolent. And he had a big heart. He cared about the city, so the Coca-Cola Corporation contributed a lot of money to the Atlanta University Center, which includes Morehouse College. Mr. Woodruff also created the center’s Woodruff Library, and Atlanta’s Woodruff Arts Center was named for him. Coca-Cola also contributed to Georgia Tech, Emory, and every other major school in Atlanta.
R. W. Woodruff was also a champion of rights for blacks. Dad told me about the day in 1961 when two young, academically qualified students, Hamilton Holmes and Charlayne Hunter, both of whom had been screened and hand-picked, were attempting to enroll at the University of Georgia, but were being prevented by the school’s president from doing so.
Coca-Cola was probably the largest corporation in Atlanta at that time because they were international, so they had a lot of clout in the state of Georgia. So R. W. Woodruff picked up the phone—he used to have a big cigar in his mouth and Dad imitated the way he talked—and told the president of the university, “We aren’t having that here in Georgia. We’re not going to make fools of ourselves like George Wallace did down in Alabama.” He then called the governor and said, “Why are you going to fight letting them in? You don’t have to. Why look stupid?”
R. W. Woodruff knew how devoted Dad was to him, and he loved and trusted Dad more than he trusted some of his executives, like Joe Jones, a white man, who handled his finances.
Mr. Woodruff was also very generous with gifts of cash. One day, Dad said to Woodruff, “I really like the gifts you’ve bought for me and I appreciate the cash, but, you know, I would also appreciate some Coca-Cola stock, if you wanted to give that to me.”
So Woodruff started giving my dad stock, and he was generous with that, too. One day he told my dad, “Joe Jones doesn’t think I ought to be giving you any stock, but I told him I was going to give it to you anyway.” To Joe Jones, Woodruff’s money was his money.
One day Dad said to Jones, “Mr. Jones, I’d like to see you outside for a minute.” They walked out to the driveway and Dad said, “Do you see this gun I’m carrying?”—Dad had a permit to carry one because he was with Woodruff—“Do you know how good I can shoot this gun?”
“No,” Joe Jones replied.
“I can throw a silver dollar up in the air and hit it four times before it hits the ground. That’s how good a shot I am,” my dad said. “If you ever tell Mr. Woodruff not to do something for me again, you’re going to find out how good I am with this gun!”
He was joking, but my dad was unafraid: Nobody was going to mess with Luther Cain. Mr. Woodruff really respected him because my dad had innate self-dete
rmination. I have that same innate self-determination in my genes and I got it from Dad.
One of the most important lessons Dad taught us was not to feel like victims. He never felt like a victim; he never talked like a victim; he never expressed one “victim” attitude the whole while I knew him. It was his inner self-determination. He just never had that attitude, so we didn’t have that attitude.
And both of our parents taught us not to think that the government owed us something. They didn’t teach us to be mad at this country. They would always say to us: “If you want something, just work hard enough, focus on it, and guess what? You can make it happen!”
And Dad made things happen. One day in the summer before I started the eighth grade, he came home and said to us: “Get in the car; we’re going for a ride.” He drove us to a suburb west of Atlanta, pulled up in front of a six-room, all-brick house on Albert Street, and said, “This is our new home.” He had fulfilled his dream of being able to buy a “whole house.”
Dad had a winning attitude about everything he did, no matter what. One day, when Thurman and I were teenagers, we were outside with Dad, just kidding around, and I don’t know how it came up, but Dad said, “I can still outrun you all!”
Being that Dad was kind of overweight, I said, “No, you can’t!”
“Yes, I can,” he insisted, “I can outrun you!”
So Dad challenged us, two young teenagers, to a foot race, right in the middle of Albert Street. There wasn’t a lot of traffic and he was just having fun, so we said, “Okay, Dad.”
We knew we could outrun my dad but we went out into the middle of the street. Then just before we started the race he said, “Now, you all have got to move back a hundred yards and give me a head start!”
“That wasn’t part of the deal!” we said.
“Move back!” he said.
And we did. I don’t even remember the result of that race. It was just so much fun—my brother and I running as fast as we could and my dad just chugging up the street.
Dad may or may not have been able to outrun us, but he had an amazing ability to think on his feet. I’ll never forget the time, many years after that foot race, that by doing so, he got himself out of a jam.
Having walked off my grandparents’ farm when he was eighteen, Dad’s material American dream was to own a Cadillac, the dream car for somebody who had nothing. His family couldn’t afford a car and Dad had never owned one before. So after working three jobs, Dad bought his first one, a black one, and he achieved that American dream.
He kept that car for a while and then he wanted to buy a new one. So he bought a white Cadillac that had all of these extra chrome fixtures on it, including a chrome horse on the front of the hood. That was the era of chrome; today you would call it a drug dealer’s car—you get the image?
He was proud of that car, with all the chrome—I remember thinking it was ostentatious—and he sold me the black one at a very attractive price, so I took it, because we were living in Virginia and we had a lot of driving back and forth to come home, and it was nice to have a comfortable Cadillac to ride in.
Then three or four years later, he decided he wanted to get another car—remember, this was a man who had started with nothing—and because they didn’t have Lexuses or BMWs then, he wanted another Cadillac, and he wanted me to buy the white Cadillac. I said okay and he bought a dark green one, so I asked, “What are you going to do with the black Cadillac?” He said he was going to give it to his father, who was about eighty years old, and was living on the farm in Tennessee.
My dad’s sister had died and we were going to Tennessee for the funeral. As I had bought the white Cadillac, and Dad had to bring the green Cadillac up for the funeral, we ended up having to drive three Cadillacs. On the way from Atlanta to Memphis, you have to go through Alabama and Mississippi, and not much of Arkansas, and then you get into Tennessee. So we’re driving in the South, in a caravan of three Cadillacs, with three black drivers—I was driving the white one, Thurman was driving the black one, and my dad was driving his new green one.
We all had CB radios, so were staying in touch with one another—I love cornbread, so that was my handle—and we were communicating with truckers who were telling us where the police were. We were driving eighty-five miles an hour in those three Cadillacs—and every once in a while, I’d go: “This is Cornbread, 10–4 on Smokey and the Bandit.”
Then a trucker would come back with, “Ten-four, Corn-bread, when you get to about mile-marker 89, you’re going to see a couple of police on your left, going in the opposite direction, so you may want to slow down.”
“Ten-four, this is Cornbread. Thank you very much.”
My cousin Jeanine—she was a little younger than I am—was riding with us and she said, “Let me talk on that thing.” Well, she kept on talking to Dad and Thurman, “Breaker, Breaker, 19–50, Bunny Rabbit…”
I said, “What kind of handle is ‘Bunny Rabbit’?”
“You need a different handle,” Thurman told her.
Well, they were just chit-chatting, so we couldn’t hear the truck drivers who were telling us, “You’ve got the cops just around the corner.”
Lo and behold, when Bunny Rabbit got off chit-chatting, we went around this corner and there was a cop standing there with a radar gun. He caught us coming around that corner at ninety miles an hour. I was in the front because Thurman had said, “I’m going to keep up with you,” and Dad was in the third car.
The cop started motioning for us to pull over and we did. Dad got out and Thurman got out, and the cop said, “You boys were going pretty fast. We’ve got you clocked at about eighty-nine miles an hour and we’ve got to write you up a ticket. Why are you all in such a hurry?”
Dad said, “We’re headed up for my sister’s funeral, and we were just trying to get there,” which was true.
And the cop said, “Well, I’ll have to write you up because you’re all going way too fast over the speed limit.”
So, Dad, who has that Ph.D. in common sense, said to the cop, “Officer, how many cars can you clock at one time?”
And he said, “Just one.”
Dad said, “So you clocked the front car?”
“Yep,” the cop said.
“So you really didn’t clock the second two?”
“You know, you’re right,” the cop said. “Since you’re going to a funeral, I’m just going to write a ticket for the one in front.”
That was me. Imagine my dad thinking that quickly on his feet! The cop wrote one ticket, and he wrote it to me.
Then, when we get back on the road, one of the truckers came on and said, “Cornbread, how’d you all come out?”
“They stopped us,” I told him.
Then he said, “We were trying to give you a warning, but somebody named Bunny Rabbit was on the CB.”
When we got to Tennessee, Dad just laughed and laughed—he thought it was the funniest thing—and I said, “Daddy, you didn’t have to pay the ticket.”
And he said, “No. You got a ticket for speeding; I didn’t.”
My dad left that black Cadillac for his dad, for him to enjoy in his final years on Earth, and Dad asked him “Well, what do you think?”
And my granddad said—his nickname was “Papa Luke” and he was a very quiet, humble man—“That’s nice.” He didn’t get overexcited, but you can imagine, when he drove to the little country church back in the woods, that he was as proud as he could be to be driving the black Cadillac that his son had given him.
Incidentally, my handle seems to be sticking to me. One member of my campaign staff, a young man named Nathan Naidu, insists that when I’m president my Secret Service name is going to be “Cornbread!” And in the meantime, he says, whenever he puts anything on my campaign schedule, instead of writing, “Mr. Cain,” I’ll be referred to as “Cornbread.” Well thanks, Nate. You’ve just told the whole world my future Secret Service nickname!
Dad never spent much time looking at his li
fe in the rear-view mirror. He just kept moving ahead despite the many detours he encountered. Now, as I travel life’s journey and some things grow dimmer and dimmer in my rearview mirror, Dad’s inspiration becomes brighter and brighter. I often think of him and Mom as I’m about to deliver a speech. I think of the life lessons they taught that have brought me to this place, and I’m as proud of them as they were proud of me.
My dad was full of life. He loved being around people and loved having fun and loved to laugh. My mother used to say to me, “The older you get, the more you act just like your daddy.”
I’d say, “Thanks, Mom. That’s a compliment.”
My childhood summers were spent on my maternal grandparents’ farm. Mom had eight brothers and sisters, and they all would dump their kids on the grandparents, to give our parents a break, I guess. Maybe they were hoping that our grandparents would keep us indefinitely, but they wouldn’t. So we’d have twenty to twenty-five kids staying with the grandparents. When all of the grandkids were there at the same time, it seemed like it was dozens.
My grandparents were farmers all their lives—my grandmother lived to be 104 and my grandfather was 94 when he passed on. They grew all of the staples—watermelon, cantaloupe, corn, beans, tomatoes, potatoes, collard greens, and cabbage—and I remember my grandfather taking them into town, to the farmers’ market, to sell them. He didn’t do that a lot; he’d go sell to the people who were going to stay at the farmers’ market, so he was like a wholesaler.
And my grandparents were very devout, churchgoing people. So even when I went to visit with them, I couldn’t get away from the expectations that I had at home: You’re going to church! It wasn’t optional.
Back in Atlanta, notwithstanding the usual sibling disagreements, Thurman and I got along well, enjoying all manner of adventures. Thurman loved to laugh and to make other people laugh. But sometimes his idea of a good laugh got us both in trouble. One Christmas, when I was ten and he was nine, our parents bought us BB guns as presents. We took the guns over to an aunt’s house and were playing outdoors when Thurman pointed his gun at our older cousin, Elizabeth. He told her not to move but she did move after daring him to shoot, so he shot her in the butt. Elizabeth was not really hurt but that BB did sting. Needless to say, Mom took the guns away from us and we never saw them again.
