In the ’60s, the struggles of the civil rights movement played out on television screens across the country, and in Kansas City, 8-year-old David A. Thomas was riveted.
Thomas recalls that as a boy growing up near 42nd Street and Montgall Avenue, on Kansas City’s East Side, he was captivated by the young black preacher from Atlanta leading this movement, and he thought, even then, that he wanted to grow up and, like the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., change the world.
The boy read all he could about King and learned that the Baptist preacher had graduated from Morehouse College in Atlanta. So when the time came for Thomas to choose a college to attend, Morehouse, a historically black college that ranks among the nation’s best schools, was tops on his two-school list.
He never got the chance to study at Morehouse. Yale University gave him a full scholarship, and that’s what his parents could afford.
But today, Thomas, 62, has come to Morehouse — as its leader. On Valentine’s Day, right in the heart of Black History Month, Thomas will be inaugurated as the 12th president of Morehouse, the nation’s largest liberal arts college for men.
Thomas was the first in his immediate family to even go to college. Neither of his parents had graduated high school, yet, “they deeply believed that education was the great liberator and great equalizer.”
From the time he was 5 years old, Thomas and his three brothers, in shifts, tagged along to work with their dad cleaning offices around the city. It was work Thomas detested. “What I thought to myself is, I don’t know what college is but I know that I’m going.”
His dad had advice for him. “He would say if you go to college you won’t have to do this.”
Thomas graduated sixth in his class in 1974 from Kansas City’s Paseo High School. High school, he said, came pretty easy for him. He spent his senior year as an exchange student in France. There was only one thing he wanted at Paseo and didn’t achieve. “I always wanted to be voted most likely to succeed, but I never was.”
At Yale, though, the first thing he learned was that his public school education did little to prepare him for the Ivy League.
“Even though I did very well at Paseo,” Thomas said, “it was not designed around the notion that the majority of the students would go to college. When I got to college, I had never even written a real term paper. I was totally unprepared for college.”
It was sheer grit and the foundation his parents gave him that propelled him through.
“The great blessing of my life was that I had great parents,” Thomas said. “My parents were amazing, and they created an amazing environment for me and my brothers.”
His Montgall Avenue neighborhood, in fact, produced many of Kansas City’s prominent leaders: Mayor Sly James and arts advocate Allan Gray and attorney Willis Toney.
Thomas went to Yale with his father’s voice ringing in his head. “He would always ask, ‘Did you do your best.’ And when I got to Yale that was the only thing I knew,” Thomas said. “I got my first paper in English and the professor gave me a D, which I had never gotten before. “
Thomas eventually figured out how to write that A paper for college and stuck with Yale, he said, because his parents had always told him he could do anything. It was an affirmation he has carried his entire life.
At Yale, Thomas went on to earn a master’s degree in philosophy and a doctorate in organizational behavior studies. He also has a master’s degree in organizational psychology from Columbia University. He has racked up 30 years of higher education experience, including time as a professor of management at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, two decades as a professor and administrator at Harvard University and most recently as business school dean at Georgetown University.
But his career stretched beyond education, with Thomas serving on several boards, including the American Red Cross. In 2014 Thomas was the recipient of the Washington Business Journal’s “Minority Business Leader of the Year” award. He has worked as a consultant on organizational change, diversity and inclusion for dozens of Fortune 500 companies, as well as governmental and nonprofit organizations. He also co-authored two books: one on the making of minority executives in corporate America and another on the pursuit of excellence in Montgomery County Public Schools in the Washington, D.C., area.
Thomas says he’s not done yet. After all, his pursuit was all about a chance to change the world. And while he has made an impact in his career, “I’m not there yet,” Thomas said.
Thomas has spent the past year transitioning into his leadership role at Morehouse, a school, he says, he developed “a romance” for as a youth.
He joins a school that for years has helped changed the world through its graduates, including Spike Lee, Maynard Jackson, Herman Cain, Edwin Moses, Julian Bond and Lerone Bennett, to name a few, African-American men working in entertainment, politics, sports, social justice, literature and journalism.
Every morning he wakes in the president’s residence. Scores of young men pass his window on their way to class. Thomas said he makes it a point to walk to his office every day just to be among them. He eats lunch in the student cafeteria.
“At lunchtime at Morehouse, 2,000 black men are on the move,” Thomas said. “I watch them and I think to myself, one of these guys is my Martin Luther King and they will change the world. They will transform the 21st century.”
This story was originally published January 28, 2019 2:48 PM.