Dr.

D'Wayne Edwards, welcome to "American Black Journal."

Well, thank you very much.

It's an honor to be here.

Yeah, so first of all, congratulations on this really interesting idea, and the ability to pull this off, which I think a lot of people are still marveling at.

I wanna start here.

Tell me why now is the right time, and this is the right way, I suppose, to reintroduce the idea of Lewis College of Business.

Well, sir, it's not really a now.

It's been brewing decades, and I would say, decades for me, being over three now, that I've been in this industry and been in the footwear industry and when I started three decades ago, I was only the second African-American in the entire footwear industry.

And over the years, those numbers slowly, slowly, slowly increased, and it wasn't until I left the industry in 2011, to really focus in on the problem of how do we better educate Black students to the opportunities of what could be possible on the design side of career aspirations?

And then that number doubled.

Once I was able to leave, it doubled, because there was this, an individual academy that was focused specifically on it.

And you know, as we look at our current HBCUs, which are amazing institutions, one of the areas of development, an opportunity is on the design side.

As you know, they are extremely strong on the legal side, and the business side, and the engineering side, but one area that has been really underdeveloped is on the physical design side.

And last year, after, obviously, as unfortunate events of George Floyd happened last year, you started to hear about all these amazing contributions being made to support Black communities by major corporations, and a lot of those dollars did go to historically Black colleges and universities, but when it came to the design dollars, some of those design dollars, they were coming to me, because I was really the only learning institution that really trained and developed Black talent from a design perspective.

And the request came in as, hey, can you help us work with HBCUs?

Hey, can you help us find more Black talent?

And it was really through a casual conversation I was having with an alumni here in Detroit and he was the first one in October to tell me that Detroit had, at one time, had a historically Black college and university.

And so, that was really my first time being made aware that there was an HBCU here, and I immediately jumped online and my team jumped online and started googling and trying to find everything we could learn about it, and we were blessed to get in contact with the family, and speaking with the family, understanding what the history was, and why did it close, and how for, close to a decade, they'd been trying to resurrect the college.

But with no real success, and so, I was like, hey, you know what?

I can figure this out, and if I could figure it out, would you wanna work with us and they said yes.

And so, about 11 months later, we got it figured out.

So there are lots of, as you point out, schools of business here in Detroit and Metro Detroit and the state of Michigan.

Why not attach this effort to one of those, and what's the importance, in your mind, of saying, no, you know what?

We're gonna do this as a HBCU and as the only HBCU in Detroit?

You know, it needs a singular focus.

It's great, the schools here are amazing, some of the best in the nation, but none of them focus specifically on people of color, and that was what we did for the last 11 years with our academy.

Even though we're an inclusive academy, just like HBCUs are, we became the go-to destination if there was a Black kid anywhere around the world who wanted to get into our industry, they came to us.

And it was that singular focus that's been missing for all these decades, is because yes, other design schools and colleges around the country, they have design programs that are also inclusive, but when you look at the national average, only 9% of African-Americans actually go to design schools and universities in the United States.

And half of them drop out, and so, what ends up happening, these different product companies, and I'm not talking just footwear, I'm talking any company that makes a product, they only have about 1% of a graduating class to choose from nationwide every single year.

And even though these universities, these colleges and universities speak to diversity and they have diversity inclusion people who try to make an effort, it just wasn't making it fast enough and it wasn't making it hard enough, and it took, you know, it takes someone to slowly focus in on it.

And that was really, you know, besides, we weren't able to be educated as free slaves, in the 1800s, one of the reasons why HBCUs were created in the first place.

Yeah.

So I wanna talk a little about the financing for all of this.

Yep.

That's an issue both on the university side, the college side, for HBCUs, lots of them really struggling to keep things above water, to keep things going, but I also wanna talk about it on the student side.

Absolutely.

The cost, what's the approach here to make sure that this is a going concern that stays going, but also, is a place where African-American kids, who often don't have the same means as other kids, are gonna be able to access it?

So I'm that kid.

So growing up in Englewood, California, I'm the youngest of six kids raised by a single parent.

College wasn't in my future, and so, I was not able to attend college.

One of the biggest two primary reasons is a lack of awareness of where I should go, and two, no money to actually attend.

And so, once I got into the industry and I started to understand how the corporate world works and understanding the relationship between corporations and colleges, it's this really weird standoff, where the industry wants the colleges to create more career-focused, relevant degrees, but then the colleges wants the companies to give them the money to create these things.

So there's this standoff so nothing really ever happens.

Me understanding that and never being an educator, I decided to hey, let me, I know exactly what the industry wants so I took it upon myself to create my own version of what I thought that the education side should be providing, and I made the companies pay for it.

So I did it for my, I did it on my own dime the first few years just so I can have proof of concept so the companies can understand no, this is not a fly by night opportunity I'm providing.

I'm actually providing something that is long-standing, so when our students started getting jobs at these companies, then it started to click to them hey, you're an actual resource for us to help better diversify our talent pool.

And so, there comes the business model.

The business model was teach kids the way they will work and have the companies partner with us to pay for their education.

Hmm.

And so, we're carrying, we've done that for over 11 years now, and as we transition into Pensole Lewis College of Business and Design, we'll do the exact same model, where our corporations will cover the tuition and the housing for all of our students that participate in the college.

That part is mission critical, because as you said, you know, HBCUs, the students have trouble paying the bill, the schools have trouble making sure they stay relevant, up to date with the latest demands of the industry, where we have that really nice balance of being able to waive the fees so that's not a hindrance.

We just need a kid that's passionate and hungry.

So I wanna go back to something you said earlier, and I just wanna make sure we emphasize that point.

You said that when you started in the industry, you were the only African-American designer.

Only one, man.

That is remarkable, first of all, I mean, just overall, but it's also remarkable because you're not an old man.

No.

(laughs) We're not talking about something that happened in the 1950s or '60s.

Tell me about the industry when you started and why it was as white as it was.

1989 is when I started, so a little over 32 years ago.

You know, it's, and I was number two, by the way, the first was Wilson Smith III.

It was just never important.

I mean, the industry, the footwear industry, sportswear industry, in general, is dominated from a white male perspective.

Even women are struggling to make waves.

They've made a lot more strides than we have, but it's just always been, that's the way it's always been, but also, the other thing, the way it's always been is they've always had Black athletes be the face of these organizations, and so, I've always challenged every company I worked with with being hypocritical.

You're putting a Black face out in front of the world, for people to believe that your products are for them, but yet, there are not people in the background designing, developing, marketing, promoting the products.

And because they didn't have to do it, and because they didn't personally see the reason why it would be a good thing, because they're not of color and they don't know the struggle, they don't know the lack of opportunities that we have, there was no real reason for them to do it if it was working, right?

Most companies don't fix things that's working, and so, it just needed some very direct attention.

I mean, even with what Beyonce has done with her career, where Vogue magazine said, we want you on my cover, and she's like, yes, if a Black photographer shoots me.

First time ever there's a Black photographer on the cover of Vogue.

Same with Serena Williams when she tells Nike, hey, I want people who look like me designing my products, and there wasn't, and then she made sure that that happened.

We have to be more directive in asking for what we want, and in some cases, we might have to demand it.

And how is that going in the shoe industry now?

Obviously, it looks different than when you started, but how different is it?

It's different in the sense of there's about 180, 85 Black footwear designers, but that's 32 years later.

And when you look at women, there's less than 20.

Wow.

In the entire industry.

Now, I got a wife and daughters.

You know we like shoes, right?

And so, for just that small of a number of Black women to be in this industry is a travesty.

Yeah.

And that was the part that also attracted me to Violet T. Lewis' story of her entrepreneurial spirit and just hey, all right, I don't see it, so I'm gonna figure out how to make it happen, where she created this school as a secretary school because she was the only one working in these offices.

And so, it's not until we take control of our future and design the one that we wanna see is when things start to happen.

But we still have an awful long way to go.

I mean, 180 is unacceptable.

It's unacceptable considering the billions of dollars corporations spend with Black faces in the front representing them and then, those Black dollars also supporting that organization in return.

We don't have, we're slowly getting to $100 million invested.

Target did that single-handedly.

So Target single-handedly did that, and that was one of the reasons why we really wanted to work with them, because they put their money where their mouth is, same with the Gilbert Family Foundation.

You know, it's not about the dollars.

It's actually, it really mattered.

It really mattered to them, and that's why they're putting forth the effort, the energy, and that's why we're working together.