By Khadeeja Safdar and Keach Hagey

For Kamau Witherspoon, it was the night that police arrived at his Minneapolis home, guns pointed at him, shortly after a jog. For Mike McGrew, it was the realization that a manager was tailing him as he shopped at a store supplied by the company where he's an executive. For Kim Seymour, it was the way she instinctively holds merchandise aloft in clothing stores to make it clear that she's not shoplifting.

After years of keeping silent, many top black executives are for the first time sharing their experiences of racism widely with their co-workers and employees. Since the killing of George Floyd and protests sparked a national conversation about race and society, many black business leaders say they feel the time has come to open up to colleagues about the difficult, sometimes traumatic encounters they face in the world outside work.

These experiences stayed private, some said, out of concern that calling attention to their race would hold back their careers or that white colleagues wouldn't understand or listen. While some black leaders are still choosing to keep their personal lives out of the work sphere, others said they feel compelled by the moment. Black people are dying disproportionately from coronavirus. A series of unarmed black people have been killed by police. An unusually graphic video documenting the last minutes of Mr. Floyd's life has gone viral.

Mr. Witherspoon, senior vice president of operations at Target Corp., had just returned from an early-evening jog and was loading the dishwasher when he noticed flashlights in his window. His heart began racing, until a floodlight switched on. Four police officers were standing in his backyard. When Mr. Witherspoon reached for his window to talk to them, three pointed guns at him. He told the story of the incident, which happened in 2008, at a meeting with about 200 fellow Target executives earlier this month.

"I was standing behind my kitchen sink with my hands up," he recalled. "It was prompted by a neighbor saying there was a suspicious black guy running through the neighborhood," he said he later found out.

Mr. Witherspoon, 46, a former Navy officer with an M.B.A., wanted his co-workers to hear directly from someone they know. "The education, the degrees, the fact that I'm a veteran -- none of it matters," he said. "I'm a black man and someone could perceive me as a threat."

The world-wide protests against racism and police brutality have sparked a wave of activity from big businesses, which have issued statements condemning racism, pledged millions to support black communities and, at some firms, vowed to hire and promote more black executives into leadership roles.

Black people make up 12.4% of the U.S. population, but only 8% of professionals, a number that has stayed steady since 2013, according to a study by the Center for Talent Innovation, a nonprofit research group. Only 3.2% of senior executive positions are held by black people. Some black executives said that they felt a sense of responsibility to use their platforms for people who don't have one, and that their goal was to change perceptions in a way that someone without their position may not be able to.

"For Black America, this is a reckoning moment," said Crystal E. Ashby, interim president and CEO of the Executive Leadership Council, which represents over 800 black corporate executives and board members in the U.S. and abroad. "They have been pushed so far against the wall that they don't have any choice but to help people understand what this feels like through their lens."

'A Burden'

There was a silence during a June 2 videoconference call when Constellation Brands Inc. Chief Executive Bill Newlands opened the floor to about 60 of his executives and staff, asking them to share their thoughts on Mr. Floyd's killing.

Mr. McGrew, 46, Constellation's communications chief and the only black member of the executive team at the beer and wine maker, spoke up about an experience he had the previous summer. He had been pushing a shopping cart around a store that Constellation supplies in the affluent Chicago suburb where he lives.

Wearing shorts and a T-shirt, he selected six bottles of wine. Then he noticed the store manager trailing him through the store, as if he were a potential shoplifter. On the call with his colleagues and boss, he said he was tempted to identify himself as a Constellation executive, but instead paid and left.

In an interview, he recalled how he became emotional on the call as he explained it was the kind of experience he had been having his entire life.

Mr. McGrew hadn't ever shared a personal anecdote of that nature at work, but "as an African-American leader in this business," he said he felt a duty to "help people understand stuff that they didn't understand before."

Target's Mr. Witherspoon said he opened up not for himself, but to prompt lasting change at the company, telling the other executives, "I'm sharing this story with you to get you to understand how significant of an issue it is, how much of a burden that I carry, the black leaders and team members carry in our stores....We're exhausted, and this is why we're exhausted."

Jill Sando, Target's chief merchandising officer, who was in the audience, said hearing his story moved her to educate herself about racial inequity. "Never in a million years would I have guessed that Kamau had this experience," she said. "It's so fundamentally wrong."

This month, Target promised to invest $10 million in black communities, provide consulting to black-owned businesses and create a task force to drive racial equity at the company and more broadly. Target said it has been hosting listening sessions for employees for four years, but the largest one took place following Mr. Floyd's killing and involved 7,000 employees.

'Unwritten Rules'

After hearing another person tell her story at a company forum, Courtney Dornell, 41, executive director of sales and marketing for the Americas at Otis Elevator Co., decided that, for the first time, she would tell her own. She wrote an essay, shared on LinkedIn, about what she considered the "unwritten rules" of being a black professional in corporate America -- don't stand out, don't wear bright clothing, don't gather in groups of more than three.

She wrote about a work trip in China, where she said staff at a restaurant made gorilla gestures and noises at her, while her colleagues didn't even notice it was happening. Later, when she told some of them, they were horrified and vowed never to patronize the restaurant again.

Sharing the story with her wider professional circle was met with support -- including from Otis CEO Judy Marks, who wrote, "Courtney thank you for sharing your personal journey. We are listening and we are learning."

"I have been with this company for 18 years," Ms. Dornell said. "These are people who really know me, but they didn't really know my experience."

Jide Zeitlin, chairman and CEO of Tapestry Inc., which owns fashion brands Coach, Kate Spade and Stuart Weitzman, recently wrote a memo to the firm's about 18,000 employees. It details a summer he spent in apartheid South Africa in his 20s and how a political gathering turned violent with armored vehicles, tear gas and rubber bullets.

"I sat down several times to write this letter, but stopped each time. My eyes welling up with tears. This is personal," starts the memo.

Mr. Zeitlin, 56, said he consulted with other Tapestry executives who discussed the possibility of softening the letter, which states "Black Lives Matter" in bold type, before posting it publicly this month. Mr. Zeitlin resisted, despite realizing he could face blowback.

"If you can't speak to your conscience at a moment such as this, when can you?" he said. "If there are some that are upset by that, or disquieted by that, so be it."

Many employees and customers offered their own personal stories and expressed gratitude to him for speaking up, though some complained that he dismissed the looting that occurred at stores. A few threatened to boycott and stopped following Tapestry brands on social media.

Mr. Zeitlin said his main focus now is to drive change and challenge companies that issued buttoned-up statements -- without mentioning words such as racism or black. "Until you acknowledge the reality, it's awfully hard to talk about how you are going to lead change," he said.

For Mark Mason, 51, chief financial officer at Citigroup, Inc. it was his teenage son who spurred him to speak up. "You're the CFO of the entire bank," his son said, according to Mr. Mason. "If you put something out, people will read it."

He warned Chief Executive Michael Corbat he planned to write something "raw." Mr. Corbat assured him he had his back. Mr. Mason addressed the issue of police brutality in a blog post on May 29 about what it was like to watch the video of George Floyd's killing, opening it by repeating "I can't breathe" 10 times, the words Mr. Floyd said in the video before dying.

"Even though I'm the CFO of a global bank, the killings of George Floyd in Minnesota, Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia and Breonna Taylor in Kentucky are reminders of the dangers Black Americans like me face in living our daily lives," he wrote. "Despite the progress the United States has made, Black Americans are too often denied basic privileges that others take for granted."

Sara Wechter, Citi's head of human resources, said she teared up and could only think, "wow," when she read Mr. Mason's words. "Mark is a very private individual and a private leader," she said. "Writing something like that must have been tremendously painful."

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06-26-20 1051ET