75 Companies Without Black Board Members
In our research to create the black enterprise Registry of Corporate Directors, our listing of black board members from the 250 largest companies on the S&P 500, we discovered that 75 companies—30% —currently do not have any blacks on their boards including quite a few household names. We did not include Dell, which included former Congressman and UNCF President and CEO William H. Gray as a board member until his death in early July. And at presstime, Sprint Nextel and Softbank were in the process of completing merger talks.
As we developed the following list, our editors reached out to the executive offices or investor relations departments of every company with a series of e-mails and phone calls to gain explanations for the absence of black representation as well as the lack of recruitment effort. We found that 58 of these companies, however, failed to provide us with any response.
*We incorrectly identified Edison International as one of our “75 Companies Without Black Board Members.†In fact, Peter J. Taylor, executive vice president and chief financial officer of the University of California (UC) system, is an African American and has served on the board of directors of Edison International since December 2011.
