PHOTO BY TIM LABARGE
Hope, But Verify
Marcus Mundy, president and ceo of the Urban League in what just may be America’s whitest major city, is in the accountability business.
Marcus Christian Mundy, M.B.A. ’07, is a joyful, savvy, politic, and passionate man. He is successful and respected, a sought-after expert in health-care finance. He’s also a black man in America and the president and CEO of the Portland affiliate of the “nation’s oldest and largest community-based movement devoted to empowering African Americans to enter the economic and social mainstream”—which means he has some truth to tell and will readily stand and testify on the subject of race in . . .
Wait.
A story about race? But we’re done with all that, aren’t we? An African American is president of the United States, for heaven’s sake, and every judge on every network TV show is a black woman—this is happy, “Kumbaya”-singing, postracial America. Everything is totally fine now. And, even crazier, a story about race in Oregon? Who could be more progressive, more colorblind than Oregonians?
True, the state has come a very long way since Oregon was home to one of America’s strongest Ku Klux Klan groups in the 1920s. Robed Klansmen paraded on Portland streets, and, championed by no less a personage than the speaker of the Oregon House of Representatives, the conveniently initialed Kaspar K. Kubli, the Klan sponsored several anti-Catholic and anti-minority bills in the state legislature.
Today, the small number of Oregonians who are African American (2 percent of the population statewide, slightly less than 7 percent in Portland, which led journalist Blaine Harden in a 2006 Washington Post article to declare it America’s “whitest” big city) have become equal partners in our community. Right?
Wrong. Actually national estimates put it at more like 73 percent equal. But that’s up almost half a percentage point from the previous year. Kumbaya!
* * *
See, here’s the thing: the America of President Obama feels a lot different than pre-Obama America. The bell can’t be unrung, the door is open for good, and so on. But the shiny new digital full-color America, at least by the numbers, looks a lot like the dusty old analog black-and-white America. Change may be in the air, but not so much on the street.
The national Urban League’s annual report on the state of black America, which measures the parity between whites and blacks in the United States based on economics, education, health, social justice, and civic engagement, put what the league calls the Equality Index at 73 percent for 2008. Which was up 0.41 percent from 2007.
Black median income sits at 61 percent of white households. Three times as many blacks as whites live below 125 percent of the poverty line. Black children are twice as likely to be uninsured as white children. The high school dropout rate for black students is improving, falling from 15 to 13 percent—but college enrollment among recent black high school graduates dropped by 15 percent. The average jail sentence for blacks is forty months, compared to thirty-seven months for whites (which is closer than it was in 2007, when it was forty-four months to thirty-four).
All of these numbers were arrived at before the U.S. economy went into commode mode, and the resulting decline may very well have hit African American households harder than white households. And the Urban League of Portland is at work on a State of Black Oregon report that will reveal where we stand locally. In any case, you can hold this truth to be self-evident: Everything is not totally fine now.
So where does this leave Marcus Mundy?
Motivated. Vigilant. And, as the fifty-year-old father of four says of himself, “Old enough to be cynical and young enough to be hopeful. I didn’t think a Barack Obama would happen in my lifetime, so for me it means a real sense of personal pride that someone who looks like me has achieved that office. Many of the same old problems still exist, but I think this moment demonstrates an expanded way of thinking on the part of all Americans. Now, whether the majority is being dragged kicking and screaming into the future, or is looking forward with hope and saying, ‘We want to be part of the right kind of change,’ I’m not sure. But the fact that America has entered a global century, involving people of many colors, is definitely beginning to creep into peoples’ consciousness.”
Mundy’s consciousness, and that of his six brothers and two sisters, was shaped early, and one-by-one the nine Mundy siblings all graduated from college. Born in Los Angeles, to a father who was an educator-turned-hospital administrator for UCLA and a mother who was a homemaker-turned-educational assistant for the public school system, Mundy grew up in a household where learning, working hard, and doing right were the golden rules. Along the way, his parents did what they could to isolate their kids from the more overt forms of racism.
“But just being black in America, you can’t ever really hide from that, even if you’re a ten-year-old kid growing up in L.A,” Mundy remembers. “My father was from Tuskegee, Alabama, and my mother was from New Orleans, and I heard many tales of racism. On my mother’s side both my grandfather and grandmother were domestics. In New Orleans it wasn’t the back of the bus, it was the back of the streetcar, but the experience was the same. My paternal great-grandfather, for whom I’m named, was a Methodist minister.”
But Mundy can declare something that is very rare in black America: On his father’s side he is a fourth-generation college graduate. The signature, in fact, on his great-grandfather’s college diploma is that of Mundy’s grandfather, who had gone to school at Bennett College in North Carolina. The son later became a mathematics professor and the registrar at Bennett, convinced his minister father to attend college, and signed the document when Mundy’s great-grandfather graduated. “I’m a very lucky black man, to have had that kind of history, and that kind of intention and direction,” Mundy says. “Of course, as a fourth-generation college grad, I should probably be as rich as Bill Gates by now! I don’t know what happened there.”
When Mundy finished high school in 1976, he headed east to Howard University in Washington, D.C.
“I chose Howard for several reasons,” he says. “First, I’d gone to an all-boys high school, so I wanted to be sure that didn’t repeat itself in college. I wanted to go far away from home and experience that first taste of independence. And I chose a historically black university because both my parents had gone to black colleges and enjoyed their experiences. And I’d gone to a predominately white high school; I was ready for some new inputs.”
Mundy, a longtime math-lover, thanks in part to his grandfather, began as a chemical engineering major. But it wasn’t long before he grew tired of coming home each night to face hours of differential equations. Mundy wanted to find something that involved numbers but would also let him use the other things he enjoyed: writing and strategic thinking. So he switched to business. And he found himself involved in the business of health-care finance, thanks to a limited choice of campus jobs.
“I was a work-study student,” Mundy explains, “and as a senior in the school of business I went to the registrar’s office to get my job, and the available choices were either in the campus bowling alley or in the hospital business office. I thought the latter was more in line with where I wanted to go. I got some good exposure there, and ultimately they offered me a job after graduation.”
After two years at Howard University Hospital, Mundy moved to Medlantic Healthcare Group in 1985 as a reimbursement analyst. He began moving up a ladder of success that spanned several jobs in several cities in the South and East. But he was never far from the realities of race, usually played in minor keys.
“There’s something called microinequity,” says Mundy, “which is the sum of all the little niggling things that happen on a daily basis to people of color or people with disabilities, things that the majority population just never has to deal with—bottom line, anytime you just walk into a room, you’re always the black guy. When I worked for a health-care company based in Atlanta, my territory was Virginia and North Carolina, so I would go to small rural hospitals to analyze their Medicare and Medicaid reports and help them optimize their reimbursement. And I would go into these all-white boardrooms in coal-mining towns and farm towns, and some of the board members wouldn’t want to shake my hand, or wouldn’t look me in the eye, or wouldn’t respect what I was saying.
“But the great equalizer was that I had what they wanted. I would find these rural hospitals an extra $50,000 or $100,000 in profit, and suddenly it was ‘Whoa—the black guy found that!? Then he’s okay with me.’ I think in a much grander way that’s what Obama has done: ‘The black guy can fix this? Then he’s okay with me.’”
* * *
By 2000, Mundy was working in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, as the manager of risk advisory services for Big Four auditor and professional services giant KPMG. His wife Leslye was offered a job with Nike in Portland, and “after interviewing out there to see if they would have me,” Mundy transferred to the KPMG office on the unfamiliar turf of Oregon.
“The first time I was in Portland was when we were house-hunting,” Mundy says, “and I liked it immediately. The first thing I noticed was how beautiful it was. I didn’t know exactly what to make of it—I was mostly used to bigger cities—and I soon noticed how white it was. I think it’s gotten even whiter since then, which is neither good nor bad, it just is. And I remember there were a lot of Birkenstocks!”
Mundy and his wife didn’t get much time to enjoy the Northwest together. He was left alone with their three daughters and one son when Leslye died suddenly in 2003. By then, Mundy had become a vice president and the regional compliance officer for Kaiser Permanente, and he threw his energy into his kids, who ranged from just three to seventeen years old at the time. Together, with support from family and friends, the Mundys made it through, but not a day or an achievement goes by that doesn’t contain an empty space where the proud smile of mother and wife should shine.
Mundy also immersed himself in work to benefit the Portland community.
“I’ve always been loyal to the Urban League,” he recalls. “They gave me my first real job in L.A., in one of their high school programs, and I’ve stayed involved ever since, either as a board member or volunteering as an adviser to young professionals. But I still sometimes wonder how I found myself in this particular chair.”
Said chair being located behind the president’s desk at the Urban League of Portland. The local affiliate of the national organization was founded right after World War II, thirty-five years after what would become the Urban League was born in 1910 in New York City. The organization grew out of the so-called Black Migrations at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The U.S. Supreme Court’s approval of segregation in the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision and the hard-as-chains system of economic, social, and political oppression the white South quickly adopted turned what had been a trickle of African Americans moving northward into a flood.
As the Urban League’s written history points out, “Those newcomers to the North soon discovered they had not escaped racial discrimination. Excluded from all but menial jobs in the larger society, victimized by poor housing and education, and inexperienced in the ways of urban living, many lived in terrible social and economic conditions. Still, in the degree of difference between South and North lay opportunity, and that African Americans clearly understood.”
But they would need help, and a multiracial group of reformers came together to create “the fledgling organization [that] counseled black migrants from the South, helped train black social workers and worked in various other ways to bring educational and employment opportunities to blacks. Its research into the problems blacks faced in employment opportunities, recreation, housing, health and sanitation, and education spurred the league’s quick growth. By the end of World War I the organization had eighty-one staff members working in thirty cities.”
* * *
By The end of the nineties, the Portland affiliate of the Urban League was in trouble. Mundy explains it this way: “Like many organizations, the Urban League tried to grow too fast and lost its focus. And many nonprofits have succumbed to the allure of chasing dollars. If any agency anywhere was granting money for anything back then, the Urban League would go after it. And, by virtue of being a well-established organization, we would get a lot of those grants—some of which we probably had no business getting. That may be a bit too strong, but it’s clear that those grants required better financial management and better accountability, and everything sort of broke down to the point that we weren’t managing the dollars or the programs properly.”
So there came a change in leadership. The respected, no-nonsense state senator Margaret Carter took over, and the Urban League slowly began a comeback to fiscal health. Mundy became a board member during that comeback, and in 2006, when the league was looking for a new president and CEO, they turned to him for interim help.
“I was in grad school at the time [at the Oregon Executive M.B.A. program], and I’d left Kaiser and was running my own health-care consulting firm,” says Mundy. “The league asked me if I would step in as interim president while they conducted a three-month executive search. I’d been involved in searches before, so I had in my mind that six months was more likely. Nine months later, they still hadn’t seen the candidate they wanted to see, and they began to turn their gaze on me. When they asked if I would consider taking the job, I hadn’t even considered the possibility. But I was getting to the age when it was time to do more than just trying to get the next big job and the next big paycheck. It was time to give something back. Not that I’m a total altruist—I have kids to feed and I like to make money, but I just kept hearing my mom’s voice telling all of us kids to be good people.”
When asked what the league saw in him that it didn’t see in the others, Mundy immediately answers, “The perfect mixture of humor and intelligence and forthrightness—and humility, of course, I should have said that one first.
“Seriously, I think they were looking for someone with a bottom-line business and financial focus,” he says. “The Urban League is an unusual organization in that we have social service programs and also are an advocacy group. . . . So it’s my job to bring my corporate experience to building relationships with power and money. We have to give our funders a value proposition and offer a return on investment. If we don’t understand that our funders don’t give gifts, they make investments, then we won’t succeed.”
If Mundy’s track record holds true, he will succeed, although he would be just as happy if some kumbaya miracle happened and the Urban League was no longer necessary. Even though there’s enough miraculous floating around out there that now the president of the United States looks like him, Mundy’s not holding his breath. Or, sometimes, his tongue.
“Even when I was working with a local firm not so long ago,” Mundy says, “a big job came open and I asked if they had interviewed any black candidates. When you’re the only black in the room, if you don’t ask the question it usually doesn’t get asked. As tiresome as it is, that’s my responsibility, being in the accountability business. So they said, ‘Oh, we couldn’t find any good candidates.’ Now I’m normally much more politic than this, but I said, ‘Well, explain to me how you couldn’t find any good candidates. What process did you use? I mean, I’m sitting two feet away from you in about fourteen meetings per week, and you never asked me to recommend anyone. I’m a member of a black accountants association, I’m part of a black M.BA.s association, a member of a black health executives association—I could have given you names instantly. I went to a historically black college with one of the best business programs around, I have alumni connections—what about this don’t you get?’ That’s the challenging part of my job. Portland is very progressive if you’re a salmon or a tree, but maybe not so much if you are a person of color. Progress is as progress does.”
Or perhaps progress is as Marcus Mundy (along with many others who share an appreciation for the possible) does. And will continue to do. Everything is not fine now—but it’s better.
“One of the reasons I took the Urban League position,” Mundy says, “is that while we are a small band of African Americans in this town, it’s a hardy bunch. And a very contributing bunch—a powerful force when we put our heads together. That’s the hopeful part of the job. I think this moment in our country represents real change, but I also believe that even when my son, who’s nine years old, reaches the workforce, the Urban League will still be needed and relevant. If everybody did what they were supposed to do, then we’d be out of business, and God bless us for being done. I think Reagan said, ‘Trust, but verify,’ and I’m willing to trust—but the league is also in that verification role. And if nobody’s watching, well, just look at where our economy stands right now. So I never stop being hopeful—and I never stop watching.”
Todd Schwartz ’75 is a Portland writer who has never, ever, sung “Kumbaya.”
