by Herman Cain
One very hot day when he and I were out with Mom, we got very thirsty and started to walk over to a public water fountain. Mom reminded us that we must use the “coloreds” fountain. Being somewhat rambunctious, however, we made sure no one was watching us, and then we drank, first from the forbidden “whites only” fountain, and after that from the “coloreds” fountain. Then we looked at each other and said, “You know what? The ‘whites only’ water tastes just the same as the ‘coloreds’ does!”
On a day-to-day basis, because the civil rights movement was a few years in front of me, I was too young to participate when they first started the Freedom Rides, and the sit-ins. So on a day-to-day basis, it didn’t have an impact. I just kept going to school, doing what I was supposed to do, and stayed out of trouble—I didn’t go downtown and try to participate in sit-ins.
But I well remember, as a young teenager, seeing signs printed in large black letters at the fronts of buses: “White seat from front, colored seat from rear.” One day when I was thirteen, my friends and I were riding home from school in a half-empty bus—this was at the time when the civil rights movement was just getting off the ground and some police officers were just looking for a reason to shoot a black person who “got out of line.” So, counter to our real feelings, we decided to avoid trouble by moving to the back of the bus when the driver told us to.
By that time, the sit-ins and the Freedom Rides had kind of broken the ice, even though things hadn’t fully changed. So we saw it every day on TV and read about it in the news. Dad always said, “Stay out of trouble,” and we did.
At Archer High School, my role models were my mathematics teacher, Charles Johnson, and our band director, Lloyd Terry. I never thought of myself as having an aptitude in mathematics, or of being some sort of mathematical prodigy, but I always did well in that subject. I made A’s all the way through high school, and I thought maybe the rest of the students in my math class were just dumber than I was.
One of the reasons I did well in that subject was that I had a great mathematics teacher in Mr. Johnson. He didn’t focus on teaching us the more complex concepts. He focused instead on making sure we understood the simple concepts. As he explained to us: “If you understand the simple concepts, you will be able to deal with the complex concepts.”
So if he had to take two days on a particular subject in order to satisfy some requirement, he would take two days to do it. And he wasn’t under any pressure, like teachers are today, to finish a certain curriculum in a given amount of time. He wanted to make sure that we learned what we needed to learn in those early concepts, even if we didn’t get into the more complicated stuff.
Mr. Johnson was also unique as a teacher in that on some Fridays when we came into class, he wouldn’t even teach math; he would sit down and just talk to us about what was going on in our lives, or what was going on in the world. He would ask us, “Do you all know what the president has done, and why?”
He would talk to us that way for the whole hour because he knew we were not getting that at home—most of the kids were from the kind of background I came from: My parents were so busy working and just trying to live that they didn’t have time to sit down and chit-chat about current events. Mr. Johnson was cut from a mold that hardly exists today.
It was at around that time that I began to develop my concept of being responsible for one’s success or failure in life—a concept I would later come to define as being a “CEO of Self”—a time when many of the qualities of determination and leadership that I inherited from my dad began to show up.
As my first goal had been to find a job that paid $20,000 a year, I realized that I had to take charge of my life, to distinguish the difference between having a dream and working toward achieving a goal—in other words, to become my own chief executive of self. A goal is something you can quantify. It is the path to your dream. The thing that connects your current goal and your next goal to your dream is called faith—faith in yourself and in your God. And you don’t whisper your goal to yourself. You say it out loud so that all your senses can participate in the process. It is important to recognize that not everybody’s dream or goal is going to be achieved on a fast track, or in a straight line. Your job is to continuously prepare yourself for whatever opportunities come along.
There are three steps involved in becoming a true CEO of Self. I call them ROI.
R: Remove barriers that prevent self-motivation to achieve goals.
O: Obtain the right results by working on the right problems.
I: Inspiration. Learn to inspire yourself.
In my experience, great leaders inspire others. But, more importantly, they inspire themselves.
During those years, Thurman and I shared several interests. We were musically inclined, both of us singing in our church’s youth choir. I inherited Dad’s vocal talent, and was asked to sing solo parts, as Dad had once done, while Thurman took after our mother, whose talents were more modest. I loved her dearly, but she couldn’t carry a tune.
Thurman and I also played the trombone, becoming first chair in our respective high school and college bands. I joined my high school band in the eighth grade even though I had never played an instrument. When Mr. Terry asked me what instrument I wanted to learn, I replied, “What you need most.” Even then, it wasn’t about me.
He said that he was short of trombone players, so I learned to play the trombone. And by the time I reached tenth grade I was the leader of the trombone section. A year later, I was chosen to be the band’s student director—the very first time a junior had been picked for that important position.
Mr. Terry taught all of us the meaning of what he called “the thrill of victory,” which, he said, could be achieved through hard work, discipline, practice, and inner pride. He insisted that we could outplay any band in the state of Georgia if we willed ourselves to do so—an important lesson for me about the collective success of a group.
Our band leader’s encouragement helped me to summon the pride, motivation, and confidence already inside me to flourish and grow. After all, just as a seed of corn needs fertile soil, water, and sunshine to grow to its plentiful harvest, success starts inside and must be cultivated with encouragement and accomplishment to prevent the growth of “weeds” of doubt.
Thurman graduated from Morris Brown College and then started his career as a computer programmer with Shell Oil in Houston. A few years later he came back to Atlanta to work at Coca-Cola. When his career as a programmer hit some detours he tried but did not succeed in several entrepreneurial ventures. But despite problems and disappointments exacerbated by alcohol and drug abuse, he never lost his love of living or his love of people.
I will always remember Thurman for the pride he took in his three daughters, and for some of the better choices he made in his all-too-short life. One major choice was his decision to remain in Atlanta so that he could help Dad when his health declined as a result of complications from diabetes. Thurman was the one who took Dad to the hospital for kidney dialysis treatments, and he chose to be at Mom’s side when she began to suffer from the effects of multiple sclerosis.
I will forever be grateful to Thurman for being there for Mom and Dad when they needed him most.
Thurman died young, in 1999 at the age of fifty-two, because he made some choices that ruined his health and shortened his life, involving alcohol and drugs. I loved my brother dearly and still grieve over his untimely death. And I know that he is looking down proudly on my incredible journey.
2
Ceo of self
In quietness and confidence shall be thy strength.
—Isaiah 30:15
Mom and Dad had always encouraged me to “be something.” But they never told me what to be. When I was still in high school, I thought that I would be a preacher or a teacher—the only two white-collar professions to which I had been exposed. But having been inspired by my father and my math teacher, Mr. Johnson, to dream big dreams, I began to see greater op
portunities in my future.
Having been salutatorian of my high school class, as well as president of the senior class, I received scholarship offers from several historically black colleges. They didn’t stem from my standardized test scores, which were mediocre, largely because I had poor reading habits growing up. While Mom and Dad were loving and supportive, they never encouraged Thurman and me to read books outside of the ones we had to read for school. Nor did they read to us; they just didn’t have time to do so.
I chose Morehouse College because of its location in Atlanta, which meant that I could commute by bus from home. When I enrolled there I had no idea of its great reputation as an institution of higher learning.
I was awarded a first-year tuition scholarship, which I lost because I couldn’t maintain a B average. While I was disappointed, I didn’t feel defeated, because I knew I had worked as hard as I could—that this was a mere speed bump on my way to realizing what I later called my “CEO of Self” goals.
I discovered just how competitive Morehouse was. Even though I had graduated as salutatorian, at Archer High School, that didn’t mean anything. Everyone was a salutatorian. Big deal! My class actually had nine hundred valedictorians and salutatorians from all over the country.
The problem was being able to pay my tuition. Mom and Dad wanted me to continue my education and they helped out. But I had to work various part-time jobs during the school year and in the summers.
I was able to get a job working for an apartment complex where they hired kids to work for the summer. They were tearing up the basement of one of these buildings and we had to tear out all the concrete in the basement of this apartment building. I don’t even know how I got the job—somebody must have told me: Go over there; they’re looking for somebody.
There were all of these older construction guys working on this project, and the first thing they said to me the first day was, “This is how you do the jackhammer.” They put me on that jackhammer and made me tear up concrete all day on that thing. I know they gave me the hardest job on purpose. When I went home that night, I was so tired that I could hardly eat dinner. My whole body was shaking from the noise. My mom said, “Are you going back tomorrow?”
I was not going to let that jackhammer defeat me. I was determined that the jackhammer was not going to be in my future. I said, “Yes, they’re not going to make me quit.” And I went back the next day. And because I showed up, they took me off the jackhammer.
They were testing me! Not long after that, my dad said, “They’re looking for a summer assistant to work in the R&D lab over at Coca-Cola,” and I was able to go and work in the R&D lab as an assistant for the rest of that summer—in an air-conditioned laboratory.
I could have dropped out of college, of course, but being CEO of Self, I had to stay and focus on whatever it took to get my degree, and I was fortunate to have the support of caring people who taught me to believe in God, to believe in myself, and to believe that I could accomplish anything I set my sights on accomplishing.
I thought when I was in Mr. Johnson’s mathematics class at Archer High that I was a good math student. When I got to Morehouse, however, I found out that I was way behind some of those other guys. But Mr. Johnson said, “Major in math; you’ve got the ability to do that.”
Majoring in math was the hardest thing I ever did. That’s when I started learning a lot of these complex concepts that some of my classmates had learned in high school. So I simply outworked them—not to beat them, just to keep up. As for my reading problem, that began to be solved when I was required to take a semester-long remedial course.
Toward the end of my sophomore year, I came down with the measles and was out of school for a week, but I worked even harder to keep up. While my measles were not contagious by the time I took most of my final exams, I showed up for them with a pullover pulled up over my head because I still had all the measles bumps all over my face.
Then, during my senior year, I was given quite an honor: I was asked to join the Morehouse Quartet, due in part to the fact that I had previously been picked for the Glee Club, a very prestigious group, on my first attempt to join it. After that, I was elected, by secret ballot, its president. Again, it was evident that other people perceived my leadership potential even before I did.
I graduated from Morehouse with a B average in mathematics. The rest of my grade point average was C. but I maintained that B average in my major. I worked hard to get that degree. I had to.
The graduation ceremony was held at the Samuel Howard Archer auditorium (Archer was also the name of my high school) on the Morehouse campus. Dr. Benjamin E. Mays, the president of Morehouse, was the commencement speaker. He retired that year and was later elected to the Atlanta school board, where he served into his eighties.
I can still see Dad, who worked such long hours that he hadn’t been able to attend most of the events I had participated in at Morehouse, sitting there, as proud as could be. Afterward, to celebrate, he took us out to dinner, not to the finest restaurant in Atlanta, but to the city’s finest soul food restaurant, Paschals, known for its fried chicken, where he treated the family to a fried chicken dinner.
Just as my high school teachers had been my early role models, Benjamin Mays took a great interest in the students. He was a great man, a great leader, and a great educator who started out in very humble circumstances—he often talked to us about the town he grew up in. It was so small that it didn’t even have a name and was simply called “96 South Carolina.” He was like the “dad” of the campus. If a man got out of line, say at a football game, he would hear about it in chapel on Monday morning. It was the kind of tongue-lashing you didn’t want to get.
Before deciding to attend Morehouse, I had also applied to the University of Georgia, as well as to the Georgia Institute of Technology—Georgia Tech—and I was not really surprised when those two state-funded schools denied me admission. Having been desegregated for only two years, they chose to keep enrollment of black students to a minimum.
Years later our daughter Melanie, although then living with us in Nebraska, was determined to attend the University of Georgia. I suspect her decision had something to do with an option I had not enjoyed. Melanie went on to graduate from the university in 1994.
My decision to attend Morehouse was one of the best I ever made. And not just because of the great education I received there. My years there provided great inspiration from three different sources: the fact that it was all male and all black; the fact that so many of its graduates had succeeded in a myriad fields; and the fact that Dr. Benjamin E. Mays was its president. Dr. Mays was a demanding educator and an inspiring leader who had high expectations of his students. His charge to us was challenging: “There is an air of expectancy at Morehouse College. It is expected that the student who enters here will do well. It is also expected that once a man bears the insignia of a Morehouse graduate, he will do exceptionally well. We expect nothing less.”
Having graduated from Morehouse in 1967, I was a beneficiary of the civil rights movement. I received twenty-five job offers, and they came from some of America’s most respected and successful corporations.
But now, I realized, I had to make good on my potential.
3
Gloria
Who can find a virtuous woman? For her worth is far above rubies.
—Proverbs 31:10
Gloria Etchison was beautiful. Let’s face it; I was first attracted by her looks. And then I figured out she was also smart.
I could say that we met through a mutual friend at a party. But the true story of how we met—the story she doesn’t like for me to tell, because of where that happened—is that we first laid eyes on each other on a street corner.
My entrepreneurial dad was still working 24/7 at his full-time job as a chauffeur when he opened a grocery store in our neighborhood, on a corner where two streets intersected. When I was a freshman in college, I worked there to earn money for my tuition.
A friend of mine, a young lady named Ruth that I had gone to high school with, lived close to the store. One day when there were no customers in the store and I went outside, Ruth was walking up the street with another young lady. I thought: This woman is gorgeous! Who is she? They finally got up to where I was and Ruth introduced us. It turned out that she was the same young lady Ruth had been wanting me to go on a blind date with. I had refused because I’d never had any luck with that kind of date.
That night, Ruth was giving a party. I went and so did Ruth’s friend, but she hardly talked to me. She was about to start her freshman year of college and was more interested in talking to some people who were already going there than in talking to some guy she had just met on a street corner.
She didn’t really push me off, but she didn’t think I was all that cool either. After all, she didn’t know at that time about my ambition or about what I had been involved in during my high school years. It was almost a year before we went out on our first date.
I actually tried to take her out the week after the party, but her mom was sick. I respected the fact that she didn’t want to go out because she didn’t want to leave her mom. This went on for a while and the next thing I knew, school was starting. She was a freshman at Morris Brown College, and I was going to be a sophomore at Morehouse College.
Then, about a year later, we ran into each other on her campus—students from the different campuses would go to others just for social reasons—and we reconnected. I asked her out and this time she said, “Okay.” On our first date, we went to the movies. I don’t remember which one, but I do remember the date. It was magic from that moment on and so I didn’t go out with anyone else. Neither did Gloria. And we dated and dated and dated.
