Past Lifetime Achievement Recipients

2009 Ernesta Procope

The Ernesta Procope Video

                

Hailed as the "First Lady of Wall Street", Ernesta Procope is the President and Chief Executive Officer of E. G. Bowman Company, Incorporated, the nation’s largest minority-owned insurance brokerage firm. Over the years the company has handled some business for 60 of the Fortune 500 companies, churches, colleges and a variety of other businesses and social welfare agencies.

Born in Central Brooklyn, Ms. Procope showed early promise as a piano prodigy who appeared at Carnegie Hall at the age of 13. Her interests would eventually change from music to real estate and insurance. In 1953, she founded E.G. Bowman, offering personal lines insurance in the mostly black Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn.

Then in the ‘60s, Ms. Procope would face her first major hurdle when riots prompted insurers to start "redlining" black neighborhoods. In one day alone, the Bowman Company received 90 cancellation notices for property insurance coverage. Frustrated that black homeowners were being denied insurance coverage, Ms. Procope took her case all the way to then Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller and convinced him to support the "New York Fair Plan", legislation that prevented "redlining" and made insurance available to all New York homeowners. Similar versions of the law have since been adopted by 26 states.

By the late ‘60s, Ms. Procope began to focus on commercial insurance accounts such as the Bedford-Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation, a community development program started by Robert F. Kennedy. Facing tougher competition in this arena, Ms. Procope developed a plan to better promote her company and ultimately landed PepsiCo as her first major commercial account.

In 1979, E. G. Bowman Company made history when it relocated from a storefront in Bedford-Stuyvesant to 97 Wall Street and became the first African-American owned business to be located on Wall Street. Ms. Procope became the broker of record for the New York City Housing Authority and the insurance broker for the construction of the United States portion of the Alaskan Pipeline. The company, licensed in all 50 States, currently boasts an array of major accounts including IBM, Avon Products, Philip Morris Companies, General Motors and Time Warner.

Most recently, Ms. Procope has become the founder and president of Bowman Specialty Services, LLP. This extension of her business provides engineering and safety services, with an insurance prevention focus, to a number of major accounts.

                   2008 Fred Davis

Rising to become the first black chairman of the Memphis City Council, Fred L. Davis was born in Memphis, Tennessee, on May 8, 1934. After graduating from Manassas High School in Memphis in 1953, Davis went to Memphis State University, where he began studying business administration. Before graduating, he transferred to Tennessee State University in Nashville, earning a B.S. in 1957. Davis entered the Army in 1957, and served in France for two years.

Davis opened his own insurance agency, Fred L. Davis Insurance, in 1967. The agency was one of the first African American-owned insurance agencies in the South. When the sanitation workers of Memphis went on strike in 1968, Davis was serving on the city council. Siding with the strikers, Davis urged the city to recognize their union. Over the course of several months, there was violence by the police against the strikers when they would march, and leaders from the NAACP and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference came to support the strike. It was this strike that brought Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to Memphis, where he was assassinated on April 4, 1968, and the strike ended soon thereafter. Davis later became the first African American chairman of the Memphis City Council.

Fred Davis Insurance is one of the most respected companies in Memphis, growing from a small office to a powerhouse of sales. Davis himself is very active in the community, serving on the board of directors of the Assissi Foundation, as a trustee of the Community Foundation, a director of the Memphis Leadership Foundation and a past president of the University of Memphis Society. He has been presented with the Humanitarian of the Year Award by the National Council of Christians and Jews and the Communicator of the Year Award by the Public Relations Society. Davis is married with three children and two grandchildren.

Past Lifetime Achievement Award recipients

Thomas L. Whatley
 George Gray

2006

Milton Moses

Ralph Murray