Herman McKinney (1938-2014) was a community leader in Seattle who spent decades advocating for equal opportunity in corporate hiring, and for diversity in graduate education.
McKinney left a career in banking to pursue social work, receiving a MSW degree from University of Washington in 1968. He the joined the staff at UW, serving as Assistant Dean of the Minority Division of the UW Graduate School from 1970 to 1973, recruiting Black undergraduates from across the country to attend graduate school at UW. In 1976, McKinney helped found The Breakfast Club, an association of over 100 Black businessmen who mentored young Black males who had been, or were in danger of being, expelled from school.
On Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr's birthday in 1993, Herman McKinney led a march of 8,000 people to the downtown office of the Seattle Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce, calling on the business community to invest in the city’s poorer neighborhoods. The Seattle Chamber of Commerce hired him, and from 1993-2006, McKinney served as director of its new initiative, the Urban Enterprise Center. McKinney worked to reduce tensions in the city by sponsoring conversations about race at public forums and private gatherings, and helped thousands of people secure livable-wage jobs through a partnership between the state Employment Security Department and more than 900 companies. The Center was renamed the Herman McKinney Urban Enterprise Center in his honor in 2013.
This photo shows Herman McKinney in 1993, posing amid the office buildings of downtown Seattle shortly after he was hired as the director of the Urban Enterprise Center.
Caption information source: Herman McKinney (1938-2014), contributed by Darlene J. Conley, July 27, 2015, BlackPast.org website. Retrieved at https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/mckinney-herman-1938-2014/ Caption information source: “Opening doors in Central Area” by Imbert Matthee, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, July 5, 1993, p. 11.
