Black IT leaders: The challenging path to the top

As a Black kid from Frederick Douglass High School, which is in one of the poorest neighborhoods in Atlanta, Richard Cox carved out a very intentional path to break from the confines of the inner city. He worked hard to excel at school, threw his all into high-school football, earned a scholarship to a prominent college, and later, followed up with an MBA.

Yet despite a proven game plan, Cox initially struggled to advance. After 17 rejection notices for jobs where the minimum requirement was a high school degree, a frustrated Cox was nearly ready to give up on the corporate world and get a master’s degree in teaching. Then a lone manager intervened, creating introductions that led first to a customer analyst job and eventually to a decades-long career in top-level customer experience and operations management, including his current role as CIO at Cox Enterprises.

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