Wachovia's record on race
Medlin believes in the importance of a good education, which he thinks can allay race problems. As he considers race, he recalls a class action lawsuit filed against Wachovia, despite the fact that Wachovia had made an effort to hire minorities. Despite difficulties like this lawsuit, Medlin believes Wachovia has a good record on race.
Citing this Excerpt
Oral History Interview with John Medlin, May 24, 1999. Interview I-0076. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) in the Southern Oral History Program Collection, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Full Text of the Excerpt
You mentioned the issue of the relative spending, the state's
priorities on Higher Ed and K through twelve. I'm wondering just
generally if you would contribute your reflections on the issue of the
state's fiscal priorities of that sort, how happy you are with the
state's tax policies as they have unfolded in the last couple of decades
and on the spending side as well.
- JOHN MEDLIN:
-
Well, my comment on spending more on higher education doesn't say we
should spend less there. But it's a, our present resources there
probably is a higher percent spent there than other states would spend
on higher education. That probably relates to the fact that we have a
sixteen campus university system that really includes some institutions
that probably stretch a little bit to call them a university and that,
are not in the same league as UNC-CH and NC State and so forth. The
politics of that consolidation have cost the state some money that
probably could have been spent on K through twelve education. I think we
collect about all the taxes we ought to try to collect. I wouldn't say
that we necessarily ought to try to cut them either. The needs are there
and the budget is tight, and we need to continue to spend to have equal
and quality education for everybody. I firmly believe that the way to
solve most of society's remaining problems is if everyone gets a good
education from Kindergarten up through whatever higher level they
deserve to or need to go in a professional training and some of that
would divert off into other fields after, during high school or after
high school rather than necessarily a liberal arts education. Then I
think we'd make a lot of progress on the race problems. If you dig into
the race issue, its economic inequality is bred by
educational inequality. It may not solve every problem, but it would
certainly solve a lot of them.
- JOSEPH MOSNIER:
-
Right. Right. Let me ask you for a few further thoughts on the whole
race question. I guess during your tenure as CEO here, you would've
witnessed not the very beginnings but a substantial portion of the
integration of African-Americans, women into the Wachovia workforce and
watched it happen in the workforce more generally in North Carolina. Can
you talk about sort of managing that process, observing that process,
key things that stand out in your mind about that whole part of our
history?
- JOHN MEDLIN:
-
Well, by the time I went into senior management in 1970, it was sort of
an accepted fact that we did not discriminate based on race, sex, blah,
blah, blah, blah, blah. Some added, additional, some things have been
added since then. But yes it was something. By the time certainly in my
divisional area and later on in the whole company, that I worked very
personally, very hard at to the point of actually doing a good bit of
interviewing of people coming in because in those days you still had to
not only do some selling inside, you had to do some selling of the
people to come in. Do you really mean what you say? And if they heard
the head of the, Executive Vice President say it or the Chief Executive
Officer, they maybe took it a little bit more seriously than some
recruiter. So I think, trying to make sure we got good people that we
got the best people. It's something I worked very hard on, and we had
goals on. We made progress on and the difficulty always was keeping. If
you hired somebody and they turned out to be very good, it was also
recognized by outsiders too and keeping them became a problem as much as
hiring, getting them in the first place. About all the good minorities
and women who had gone to seek other fortunes over the years. We have a
good retention rate; don't get me wrong. This is not unusual. We have
more in the upper reaches now. We have two
[unclear]
.
- JOSEPH MOSNIER:
-
Reflecting back, was it a process that presented any undue hurdles or
complications, fairly smooth pattern of integration across those years.
- JOHN MEDLIN:
-
Well, we had a class action suit in 1974-
- JOSEPH MOSNIER:
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I wasn't aware of that.
- JOHN MEDLIN:
-
After considerable frustration with our attorneys that were talking to
other class action attorney that happened to be Julius Chambers,
prominent civil rights attorney. I finally got in my car one day without
the knowledge of our attorneys and went down to see Julius and said,
'Julius, look who has done a better job of hiring
minorities in North Carolina than Wachovia?' He said, 'Nobody.' I said,
'Well, why in the world would you want to pick us out?' He said,
'Because if we get you then they know the rest of them are going to be
even scareder.' I said, 'How do we settle this damned thing? We don't
deserve this.' So we eventually once the conversations were opened and
we got it settled, and it was not representative of what we had done. It
was just the publicity. I don't care. You go to any company in this
country and if you can't find a case that can be made and can look very
bad, I'd be surprised because of what somebody on the line down there
somewhere does that you don't know about. You can make speeches and have
policies and write memos, and you're not going to get one hundred
percent perfection. Those are the kinds of things that we got caught in.
Your numbers are never going to do-you start doing average
salaries and all that stuff, and you're going to still have problems.
No. It was not without its anxieties and frustrations and worries. It
was something that I think we had a good record on.
- JOSEPH MOSNIER:
-
How about, you mentioned that a generation ago, twenty or thirty years
ago, you had folks down working in the front lines in the company, any
company here or elsewhere. There's a mindset that prevailed at the time
among some small number of folks that could cause these kinds of
problems. Today and not just Wachovia, generally, do you think that
that's much less significant of an issue? Does it prevail still as a
problem in a significant way? Has the corporate and business mindset
really fundamentally changed?
- JOHN MEDLIN:
-
Well I'm five years out of the trenches so to speak having really
retired from management at the end of '93. I think it's a less
significant problem. To say there aren't some of those problems there
would be not true, I think, because there are still people with
attitudinal failings that built up over years, just plain carelessness
sometimes with some of the kinds of remarks that you hear people make.
They aren't really racist, but they say stupid things and some of those
do stupid things. I think the trend line is good.