The Untold Power: Underrepresented Groups in Public Relations

By Melody T. Fisher

The Untold Power: Underrepresented Groups in Public Relations fills a glaring void in public relations history by chronicling the practices and scholarship contributed by members of ethnically and racially underrepresented groups.

The evolution and advancement of public relations have been recorded and taught as an integral part of the communications curriculum, but the stories of these trailblazers went untold.

The text offers snapshots of past, present, and future endeavors with the hope that the reader will be inspired, reflective, and proactive. Everyone from students to seasoned professionals will learn of individual and group challenges and triumphs in academia, the workplace, and society.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Business Expert Press
• Release date: Jul 19, 2022
• ISBN: 9781637422410

Melody T. Fisher

Melody T. Fisher, PhD, Associate Professor of Public Relations joined the Mississippi State faculty in 2014. Before joining MSU, she was Assistant Professor and Chair of the Department Mass Communication at Tougaloo College. Dr. Fisher received her Bachelor’s degree from Tougaloo College and both masters and doctoral degrees in Public Relations and Mass Communication, respectively, from the University of Southern Mississippi. At USM, she was a charter member of the Black Graduate Student Organization, and graduate assistant and advisor for the Department of Minority Affairs. Throughout her career in higher education, she has made several presentations at national conferences and published journal articles and book chapters on public relations in religious communities, crisis communication, image repair and media portrayals of minority groups.

Book preview

The Untold Power

The Untold Power

Underrepresented Groups in Public Relations

Melody T. Fisher, PhD

The Untold Power: Underrepresented Groups in Public Relations

Copyright © Business Expert Press, LLC, 2022.

Cover design by Charlene Kronstedt

Interior design by Exeter Premedia Services Private Ltd., Chennai, India

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other except for brief quotations, not to exceed 400 words, without the prior permission of the publisher.

First published in 2022 by

Business Expert Press, LLC

222 East 46th Street, New York, NY 10017

www.businessexpertpress.com

ISBN-13: 978-1-63742-240-3 (paperback)

ISBN-13: 978-1-63742-241-0 (e-book)

Business Expert Press Public Relations Collection

First edition: 2022

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Description

The Untold Power: Underrepresented Groups in Public Relations fills a glaring void in public relations history by chronicling the practices and scholarship contributed by members of ethnically and racially underrepresented groups.

The evolution and advancement of public relations have been recorded and taught as an integral part of the communications curriculum, but the stories of these trailblazers went untold.

The text offers snapshots of past, present, and future endeavors with the hope that the reader will be inspired, reflective, and proactive. Everyone from students to seasoned professionals will learn of individual and group challenges and triumphs in academia, the workplace, and society.

Keywords

public relations history; underrepresented groups; social movements; education; research; professional associations

Contents

Foreword

Chapter 1 Introduction

Chapter 2 Pioneers From an Overview Perspective

Chapter 3 Professional Pioneers

Chapter 4 Educator Pioneers

Chapter 5 Understanding the Public Relations Process

Chapter 6 Advancing the Profession

Glossary

References

About the Author

Index

Foreword

On an autumn day in 2016 I decided that building diversity in the field was going to be the Museum’s new mission. While the mission had long been to collect, preserve and exhibit the history of the PR field, I decided that that day a much deeper, more meaningful mission had to be set into motion, and fast.

A grad class from George Washington University had come to visit the Museum, then situated on the 5th floor of the century-old Library of Baruch College. This was a fairly diverse class. The dozen or so students walked around to check out the many photos, books, and artifacts and then sat down to hear the lecture. As I was starting to recount the field’s beginnings, an African American woman in the front row raised her hand, interrupting me with a question that would forever change the Museum’s future.

Professor? she asked, pointing to the exhibits around the space. How come no one here looks like me? I was shocked, speechless. How come I had never thought of this before? Why were there no materials from professionals of color? And more important, who were these professionals?

I promise you, Sandra, I said, we’re going to be fixing this, and soon. On the evening of February 9, we held the industry’s very first Black PR History event, with Dr. Rochelle Ford, Dr. Denise Hill, Judith Harrison and Don Singletary, presenting the lives of three Black PR pioneers: Moss Kendrix, Ofield Dukes, and Inez Kaiser, who had died just a year before. We also had invited up Dukes’ daughter, Victoria, and Kendrix’s son, Rick, to pay tribute to their parents. The audience, who had to trudge through a record-setting blizzard to get there—Dr. Ford actually had to take a Greyhound all the way down from Syracuse—was standing room only. I looked around the room to see students, professionals, organization heads, mesmerized by stories of remarkable people they had never known existed. I saw more than a few I saw wiping away tears.

It was as if they were discovering long-lost relatives they never knew they had, a connection to a history that had previously been a void. The stories of these pioneers validated their own stories.

So this history that we’ve been indoctrinated were comprised only with white men, was now suddenly coming to life, and coming to life with people who looked like them.

Enabling students and young professionals to discover a deeper connection and meaning to this field is one reason Ms. Fisher’s book is so vitally important to today’s practice. While the field has made considerable progress in attracting more young people from underepresented groups, their numbers decline after four or five years. Perhaps they do not see a path ahead for themselves; perhaps they are realizing the field is just not right for them; perhaps they do not see enough people who look like them in leadership positions around them.

So while we’re increasingly seeing a fuller and fuller pipeline of well-qualified diverse job candidates coming into the field, for a variety of reasons, that pipeline becomes leakier the longer the candidates are employed in the field.

With this book, Dr. Fisher has set out to help put a stop to this cycle. Here, she chronicles the lives of diverse professionals—the trailblazers of today and yesterday who managed to push through the bias and inequities, to achieve leadership status as professionals and scholars, often becoming the first diverse professional in their institution.

Theirs are the stories whose lives today will inspire the professionals of tomorrow.

As a native of Mississippi, Dr. Fisher grew up in an environment still impacted by the Jim Crow era. She saw first-hand the impact of generations of racial discrimination—preventing promising young students from reaching their full potential, getting into college, and later, rising up the corporate ranks as quickly as they deserved. It drove her to learn from the diverse public relations pioneers who came before her, to learn about the ups and downs of their own careers, and specifically, how they rose up the ranks in corporations, agencies, and academia. It continues to be a mission of Dr. Fisher to help plug up the leaky pipelines, to encourage a more even playing field so that more diverse professionals will be able to see that success is possible for themselves. While Dr. Fisher still sees challenges, she is hopeful that it is increasingly possible for talented young people today to succeed. Here she outlines the myriad paths that are available for them to pursue, the growing industrywide support which they can now access, and the inspiring lessons to learn from the trailblazers that came before them.

For diverse young professionals today, who wish to pursue a career in this field, Dr. Fisher contends, there are more possibilities and industrywide encouragement than ever before.

By Shelley Spector, Founder, Museum of Public Relations

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

The profession and study of public relations have advanced much since Ivy Lee’s famed, Public Be informed era. As students, educators, and industry professionals, we have seen the evolution of two-way communication practices and the emergence of social media and analytics. We have mentally noted and vociferously debated about organizations’ public snafus, and we have witnessed said organizations deliver a myriad of responses ranging from thoughtless and disastrous to remorseful and vindicated. We have celebrated those who have chartered the course and been the impetus for these developments. Men such as Walter Lippman, Edward Bernays, and Harold Burson cemented their individual legacies in public relations history, and women have begun to be acknowledged for their contributions to the field. Doris Fleishman, Betsy Plank, and Anne Williams Wheaton broke barriers as well as glass ceilings to demand a place in history.

While her story is receiving necessary, long-anticipated attention, other historically underacknowledged groups have gradually garnered recognition. Individuals from racial and ethnic communities have not been historically counted as mass contributors to the practice of public relations. Whether positioned as the first in their respective groups to achieve a momentous accomplishment or other notable superlatives, these pioneers are not often found in textbooks or other publications. In his 1994 book, The Unseen Power: Public Relations. A History, Scott Cutlip charged his lack of inclusion to being a fact of history, not a choice of mine (Cutlip 1994, xi). When individuals from these groups are included, their presence is visually marginalized. Professor Denise Hill noted oftentimes these luminaries were often separated and boxed away from others presumably to illustrate their distinction (Hill 2021).

Authors have attempted to fill this void by showing reverence to underrepresented persons in the communication field. Jackson and Brown Givens (2006) published Black Pioneers in Communication Research to recognize 11 Black communication scholars. In addition to the honorees’ educational background and other credentials, the authors offered in-depth argument as to why these scholars’ works are an influential part of the center of communication inquiry (Jackson and Brown Givens 2006, 1). Public relations executives themselves contributed to Diverse Voices: Profiles in Leadership, a joint initiative of the Public