When Quiester Craig graduated from Morehouse College in the spring of 1957, the storied historically black institution was celebrating its ninetieth anniversary. The alma mater of transformational Black figures like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Sanford Bishop, and Floyd McKissick, the Atlanta campus had a long tradition of graduating Black leaders in science, religion, and politics.
But Craig would quickly learn that beyond the world of Black excellence in Atlanta, and its historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs), success in his chosen field was rare.
Craig and his classmates read with hope the advertisements for business positions in the Atlanta Constitution. When they applied, those hopes were dashed.
“We had been reading the ads for some time,” Craig said. “So we were shocked when we started applying for those jobs and came to realize that those ads were not meant for us Black students.”
“Since we could buy the paper, we believed we had an equal chance,” Craig said. “We were optimistic and naïve in that particular area, although we should not have been. I received a few calls for potential employment, but when the recruiters found out that Morehouse was an HBCU, that was the end of the inquiries.”
That year, a survey of graduates found Morehouse men thriving in science, law, agriculture, and religion. But almost no one was working in business and industry. In the Jim Crow era, those who did were doing so entirely in Black-owned businesses, with opportunities at America’s largest firms, banks, and businesses closed to them.
But at Morehouse, Craig had been taught and mentored by Jesse Blayton, one of the first Black men to become a Certified Public Accountant. He saw that barriers could be broken. Further, the college had instilled in him that it was the responsibility of all Morehouse men to represent not just themselves but their people, lifting them up and creating opportunities where none existed.
Dr. Benjamin Mays, president or Morehouse College during Craig’s time there, was a further inspiration. Mays, who would be an advisor to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., coined the term “Morehouse Mystique,” a certain distinction exemplified by the college’s graduates and their commitment to “academic excellence, the elocutionary arts, high moral values, social commitment, and belief in a higher power.”
Over the next fifty years, Craig would become not just a Black pioneer in business but an advocate and mentor for generations of Black business students. After a long and successful career in business and academia, he became dean at N.C. A&T University’s business school in 1972, where he also taught and acted as chair of the accounting department. He helped the school achieve accreditation from The Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business and built it into an incubator of Black business talent that would graduate business owners, CEOs, and chairs of the boards of Fortune 500 companies.
This week, one of his early students, Tanya Mitchell, will release a book documenting Craig’s life and influence. A&T will host a launch event for her book, More Than a Dean, on Saturday at the campus’s Alumni Event Center at 200 North Benbow Road at 2 p.m.
We recently caught up with Mitchell, a first-time author, to talk about the book. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
First, I want to congratulate you on this book. I spent the last week reading it, and it’s exhaustive. It not only takes in all of Craig’s personal history, career, and influence but gets deeply into the many students he mentored and influenced, yourself included.
Thank you. I really spent almost ten years researching and writing it. It began as a project to contact the students whom Dean Craig influenced and let them tell their stories through letters. That was an idea that evolved from preparing his retirement celebration in 2010. And then, when I had compiled the letters in 2016, I began thinking that this was really a full book. In 2017, I got Dean Craig’s permission to write his story.
In the book, he really comes off, in spite of all of his success and accomplishments, as a man who is very modest and would rather turn the spotlight on others. Did that make him a difficult subject?
I would say it took me about a year to get him to really open up with his full story. He would always understate his accomplishments and the role he played in everything. I think that was just part of his nature. But we know from so many students, generations of students, how important he was. That’s why I had to write the book. Someone really needed to tell this history.
You came to A&T in 1975, just a few years after Dean Craig came to A&T and got accreditation for the business school. He had just begun turning it into what it is today, an essential part of the nation’s largest HBCU. Tell me a bit about what he imparted to you then as a student.
I called the book More Than a Dean because he really was, to all of us. From a young age, he had been educated in the laboratory school on the campus of Alabama State College and later Morehouse. And part of that HBCU education was uplift, was helping the entire community, mentoring others, and providing a pathway.
Dean Craig expected hard work and excellence, but he also saw the person in every student. He could look at you and talk to you, and he could tell what you needed to work on, what would help you to succeed. For one student who was self-conscious about her height, he suggested buying a pair of heels and learning to walk in them, to help her confidence and to help her feel that professional presence.
With me, he gave me three pieces of advice:
1) Get yourself a watch and always be on time. That was part of professionalism, respecting yourself and respecting others and their time.
2) When you meet someone, however important they are, remember we all go to the bathroom the same way. That was him saying, you are as good as anyone else. Don’t be intimidated because you may be in places or with people you have never seen before, who seem impressive. We’re all the same underneath.
3) ‘Arthur Andersen’ is spelled with an ‘e’ and not an ‘o.’ That was the firm in New York where he helped me to get an internship. He not only awarded me a scholarship, but he helped me to get started in the business world that way.
Those are lessons that he taught a lot of people, not just in my class but in classes that came after us. One of his students went on to become the chair of the board of Victoria’s Secret. They worked on Wall Street for decades. They carried those lessons with them. You can read that in their letters about him.
At Morehouse, Dean Craig was taught and mentored by one of the very first Black men to be a Certified Public Accountant — a very important certification that opened a lot of doors. But of course, when the first Black CPAs were emerging in the 1920s, it was Black banks and businesses where they could work. Craig took that mentorship and became part of the chain that broke that glass ceiling, the generation that pushed into formerly white spaces and were pioneers. Did you appreciate that history then, the lineage you were part of when you were a student and he was mentoring you?
I don’t think I had a full appreciation of it at the time. I was a first-generation college student. It was really through researching and writing this book that I understood it all.
But the history of HBCUs is a history of resilience, overcoming obstacles, and breaking barriers. That’s what they were for Dean Craig’s mentors, it’s what they were for him and for his students, because he gave back and he became part of helping others do that after him.
For Dean Craig, the HBCU was about training and education and it was about access. He believed you have to have a seat at the table. If you have a seat at the table, you can advocate for your community, advocate for others, everyone is lifted up by that. It’s not just about what an education can do for you.
