The Designer
Uu//v Triplett arui fam ily in McKinley Thompson's
"W arrior" vehicle he designed fo r the overseas market.
McKinley Thom pson, a gifted
designer, emerged on the automotive
scene in April 1956 at Ford. In fact, his
hand prints are on the original Ford
Falcon, Ford Mustang, and Mercury
Cougar. He designed big tractor trailers
and a lot of products used abroad.
Thompson graduated from the Art
Center College of Design in California
in 1956, four years after winning a
scholarship in a competition for Motor
Trend magazine. He designed a vehicle
called the Typhoon that caught the
judges' attention. .
"On my first day, George Walker
(Ford's vice president of design) said to
me, 'Now you are a member of the Ford
design team, you can go as far as your
talent can take you,' " Thompson, 78,
recalled in a recent interview from his
home in Phoenix, Ariz. "He also told
me that if anyone gave me a problem to
let him know. So, If anyone objected to
my being there, I never knew it or they
kept it to themselves." Thom pson
retired in 1984 as manager of Ford's
appearance development department.
Though a designer by training, he also
had an eye for practicality, and was
capable of collaborating on products
that were both stylish and functional.
W hen Ford created the appearance
development department in the 1970s
to create an environment for designers
and engineers to optimize style and
function, Thompson was brought in as
a supervisor, and later promoted to
manager.
"I do have a very broad understand
ing of the importance of design and its
relationship to function," Thompson
explains. "It helps a great deal to
increase collaboration between design
ers and engineers to understand their
capabilities. Lots of times engineering
W hv C an’t We all Just Buckle U p?
wanted to make changes that adversely
affected and offended the design part of
the operation. We had to handle the
modification in such a way that it was
not detrimental to the overall design."
Thompson is enjoying retirement
but his legacy continues. Today's
African-American auto designers rec
ognize Thompson as a trail blazing pio
neer in the field of automotive design.
The P erry Inroads
L o w ell Perry
With Levi Jackson shaking things up
at Ford, Lowell Perry, a law school grad
uate, was doing similar things at the old
Chrysler Corp. He joined Chrysler in
1963 as a corporate relations represen
tative, making him the first African-
American executive at Chrysler.
In 1973, Perry earned another "first"
when he was promoted to oversee oper
ations for Chrysler's Gear and Axle
plant, the first African-american plant
manager at any U.S. auto company. He
was responsible for 3,800 employees.
His 17-year career was interrupted
when then-President Ford invited him
to chair the Equal Employment
Opportunities Commission in 1975.
Perry died at the age of 66 on Jan.7,
2001 but his legacy lives on, too.
Jackson, Thompson and Perry were
turning points for African Americans in
the auto industry, says Tate. They rep
resented a marked departure from
merely looking at African Americans as
a source of labor, only good for heavy
lifting.
"There was a total change of
thought," Tate said. "African Americans
were now looked at as talent as opposed
to people to move boxes."
The Civil Rights movement opened
more doors, and during the 1970s more
and more African Americans were
given management and executive-level
positions in the auto industry.
Where w ere the Women?
African Americans, overall, didn't
have an easy time expanding their pres
ence in the auto industry. Black males,
however, were several steps ahead of
Black females. Women of any color in
the early 1900s were never thought of
as managers or executives, and African-
American women were certainly not
considered as secretaries or administra
tive assistants.
It wasn't until much later that Black
women began to show up in automo
tive assembly plants, and that was to
assemble armaments for World War II.
During the 1940s and 1950s, Tate's
research found that Cadillac hired
Black women as housekeepers to clean
executive offices.
It wasn't until the 1960s that
African-American women began to
break ground in the secretarial ranks.
One of those early Black secretaries was
Dorothy Walker, hired in 1963 as secre
tary to a powertrain group's personnel
manager at General Motors.
Things have changed considerably
for African-American women in the
auto industry. Over the years, they have
gained positions as managers and
senior managers in various depart
ments. They are designing cars, engi
neering products and managing assem
bly plants.
But a big breakthrough came in
1999, when two African-American
women shattered the glass ceiling.
Deborah Stewart Coleman was named
president, CEO and chief operating
officer of AutoAlliance International
Inc., a joint venture between Mazda and
Ford, and Veronica Pollard was named
vice president of external affairs at
Toyota Motor Sales USA Inc.
These are just a few women that
have advanced in the auto industry,
there are many more. That's because
trail blazing by Jackson, Thompson and
Perry continues to create opportunities
for men and women alike who were
previously excluded from the white-
collar corridors of the automotive
industry. •
February/March 2001