Past Lifetime Achievement Recipients
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.
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