Not the last… | Erica B. | Senior Executive, Mentor, Changemaker

Where I grew up, in one of the country’s five poorest zip codes in Peoria, Illinois, nobody taught you how to get ahead. We were taught how to survive. 

My mother was a woman with multiple master’s degrees who was disowned by her own family for having a Black daughter. She watched doors close in her face over and over once employers realized I existed. I watched that too. 

From the time I was small, I understood that opportunity was not something that found you. It was something you fought for, built, and protected because the world was perfectly comfortable watching it pass you by.

By seventh grade, I had already learned how to disappear. I tested in the top 2% nationally and deliberately failed assignments so I wouldn’t be seen. Being smart, being biracial, being me—none of it fit what the world seemed to allow. 

So I made myself smaller. I survived by shrinking. 

Then a teacher named Mr. Orr refused to let me. 

He saw through the performance. He fought for me and pushed me back into the light. When I was put forward for the American Legion Award—an honor that had never gone to a Black student—he challenged a system that had already decided the outcome.

I met the moment.  I became the first Black student to ever receive it. 

Not because opportunity knocked. 

Because someone built a door. 

That pattern didn’t end there. 

I was expelled from my Catholic high school despite a 4.5 GPA. The stated reason was uniform violations. The real reason was that I was one of only three Black students, the only one on scholarship, and on track to be valedictorian. Wealthy donors did not want a Black girl “from the hood” outranking their children.

Pressure followed.

A reason was found.

I was removed.

At my next school, I found Mrs. Timmes, my counselor—a civil rights activist who had fought segregation. She didn’t offer sympathy. She offered discipline, advocacy, and refusal to quit. 

Where support had disappeared under pressure, she stood in it—and didn’t let it disappear again. 

Every single day, she made me complete scholarship applications. Every day, I did.

When teachers resisted placing me in advanced classes, she intervened. When my ACT score was questioned—“too high for a Black student”—she took it to the school board. 

We did not back down.  That relentlessness created opportunity.

I earned a full-ride engineering scholarship—the first kid on my block to go to college. 

Mrs. Timmes taught me something I still carry with me: opportunity does not create itself. It is built by people who keep showing up, challenge systems that resist them, and refuse to let what is unfair become permanent. 

I entered corporate America the same way I had entered every room before it—without a blueprint, without a safety net, and often without seeing anyone who looked like me already there. 

So I built what I could not find. 

Over a 25-year career, I built processes that became board-level models, delivered growth others said wasn’t possible, and made sure I was never the last person like me in the room if I could help it. I mentored. I sponsored. I spoke names in rooms others had not yet entered. 

I never forgot what it felt like to stand outside opportunity, looking in. 

Today I lead a global team of more than 1,300 people, oversee a multi-billion-dollar portfolio, sit on boards, fund scholarships in my hometown, and helped raise 14 teens alongside my three biological children. 

None of it was handed to me. 

All of it was built. 

What being FirstGen taught me is that you do not wait for a seat at the table. 

You do what Shirley Chisholm said to do: 

You “…bring a folding chair.” 

Because for those of us who were never expected to belong, changing the world rarely begins with permission. 

It begins when someone decides…not to be the last.