As a big fan of UMass Boston, I am particularly honored to have been invited to speak today and to receive the College’s Distinguished Executive Award. In acknowledging our contributions to the community this award really goes to the core of a conversation we have been having at the Bank for two decades.

At one level philanthropy is really about your engagement with the community and for Wainwright this is part of a larger narrative that includes nearly two thirds of a billion dollars of community development lending and our willingness to use our voice on behalf of the progressive causes of our clients. It has been said that a true philanthropist plants trees under whose shade he will never sit. Perhaps a similar observation could be made of many of our social justice initiatives.

The Bank has often been referred to as an institution with two bottom lines. The social justice platform, our second bottom line, is in fact fueled by the business platform – they are mutually supportive – and the success of that is directly related to efforts of our employees who we consider to be stakeholders in the Bank along with customers, communities and shareholders.

I work in an industry that measures everything and on occasion needs to be reminded of the words of Robert Kennedy. And I quote; ‘The gross national product does not allow for the health of our children; the quality of their education; or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, or the intelligence of our public debate. It measures neither wit nor our courage. Neither our vision, our wisdom, or our learning. It measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.’

Since the Bank’s founding we have become, on the one hand, an entrepreneurial success story as well as hopefully, a catalyst for social change. Social justice is the driving value system of Wainwright Bank and is predominantly derived from the civil rights movement. The civil rights movement of the '60s has evolved today into a coalition of “rights” issues - homelessness, affordable housing, rights of people living with AIDS, immigration rights, environmental justice, economic equality and gay rights, are all the children of the civil rights movement. These second generation rights issues define who we are and I can think of no other university that better exemplifies these values than UMass. My remarks today are about how my values and my profession and five decades of civil rights history intersect.

Over the years when we involved our institution in affordable housing, issues of homelessness and the environmental movement, many called our efforts admirable. When we extended our outreach to support of the gay community, issues of civil liberties and the peace movement, many in the business community questioned our judgment but applauded our courage. As we celebrate our 20th year and approach $1 billion in assets with 40,000 accounts and over 600 non profits that now call Wainwright their bank, it is useful to pause and reflect on where it all began for me.

Fifty years ago, I watched on my small black and white TV, a somewhat fuzzy, yet unsettling view of the definition of patriotism through the eyes of the Army McCarthy hearings. A climate of fear and oppression was being fostered that did much to chill dissent. Fast-forward to today, my TV screen is much larger, the picture clearer, but the view of patriotism perpetuated by our government is still just as narrow. Thus began my educational journey.

I must confess, that journey did not start out all that auspiciously. The first college I ever enrolled in was a night school, Jersey City Junior College. At the end of my first semester, I received both my marks and a notice that the college would not open next year as they had gone bankrupt. No, not a very auspicious start.

Still I pushed on, undeterred, and enrolled at the state university where ROTC was mandatory. Soon enough, like many young men in that situation, I found myself upon graduation looking to a future that included a place few of us knew much about back then, Vietnam.

I went to Vietnam in 1966 and in my first assignment, replaced a platoon leader who had been wounded. The platoon had suffered a number of casualties a few days earlier. While waiting to meet the company commander in his tent I noticed a draft of a letter to the mother of a soldier who had been killed in that incident. The letter attempted to express the military's condolences and to explain the unexplainable. I later came to learn that the young man's name was Robert Terry from Homestead, Florida; he was a black man and just a few days short of his 22nd birthday. Although I never met Robert Terry, I shall never forget him. It is through the lens of his short life that I try to view the civil rights movement.

Robert Terry was 10 years old when Brown vs Board of Education desegregated his school system. He was 20 years old when the Civil Rights Act prohibited segregation in public places. He was 21 years old when the Voting Rights Act of 1965 made it easier for him to vote. (Given that he was from Florida, that statement may be relative.) Had he lived and returned home, fallen in love and married a white woman, sixteen states would have criminalized his marriage. It wasn't until June 1967 in Loving v Virginia that the Supreme Court removed this archaic prohibition against interracial marriage.

Although not often, even in those days in Vietnam, there were moments of reflection where I could contemplate a future that did not include the Army. I'm not sure I was quite serious when I wrote to the Princeton Educational Testing Service about taking the Business Aptitude Test. Back then they had a policy that if you were more than 200 miles from a testing site they'd send someone out to administer the test. Half tongue in cheek, I told them if they were careful and took a convoy out Route 13, they might find me at a place called Lai Khe. We compromised and finally, I traveled into Saigon one day and took the test.

Convinced they had made an error in admitting me, I arrived at Harvard Business School in the fall of 1967. In the 1960's HBS may have been the West Point of Capitalism but it was still a world of white male privilege; or as has been said 'a place where some of my classmates born with the silver spoon in their mouth go to claim the complete place setting'.

With financial assistance from the GI Bill, an inexpensive suit and an anti war button pinned to it, I could not have felt more out of place. It was a world away from the diverse ranks of the soldiers with whom I had served. Each of them a product of an educational system, that could almost have been designed to enhance the advantages and disadvantages we are born with. To contemplate some day that these values and experiences would play a central role in a publicly traded company was more than I could ever hope for.

Among other issues Wainwright has championed, none may be as courageous as our support of rights for the gay community (especially in the early 90’s). Whether it was becoming one of the first corporations to support Boston’s Gay Pride celebration or becoming the first bank in the state to offer same-sex domestic partner benefits, Wainwright has been in the corporate vanguard of this issue. Additional milestones include a 1995 Harvard Business School case study of the Bank’s outreach to the gay community, which is now being taught at universities nationwide. By being visibly committed to these issues Wainwright has made it possible for far larger institutions to make their workplaces more equitable.

The nexus between civil rights and civil liberties was driven home in a meeting at Wainwright Bank, when a young black woman said that her parents faced the destructive pathology of racism with separate drinking fountains many years ago. As a lesbian she poignantly described the civil marriage debate as the separate drinking fountains of our time.

Earlier I mentioned immigration as a part of the coalition of civil rights issues. And in view of the recent political debate that took place in the primaries, I would like to comment further on this. In 1996 I wrote the following thoughts about a political campaign that had a similar toxic quality.

"In listening to the rhetoric of that political campaign I was struck by the oft repeated phrase "Listen Jose, you're not coming in!" Given the frustrations surrounding current immigration policy and the persistent desire of the campaign to scapegoat the Hispanic population, they may wish to expand their vocabulary of Hispanic names. Even when you are using a not so thinly veiled code, a little variety is useful. Here are some additional suggestions: Juan, Ramon, Alejandro, Luis, Manuel, Jorge, Arturo, Francisco, Armando, Fernando, Rafael, Ricardo, Alfonso, Carlos, Jesus, Lorenzo, and Ruben. The campaigns might be interested in where these names can be found. Including Jose, they are repeatedly inscribed on a wall in Washington, D.C.: THE VIETNAM MEMORIAL.

As you can see I feel it is important that we speak out on these issues and not retreat to our individual islands of self-interest. Social justice for all of us should extend from the Hispanic soldier on the Vietnam Wall to the smallest child in our school system without regard to their immigration status.

Those thoughts seem even more relevant today and further underscore the important role a bank can play when it is willing to invest its cultural and political capital. Since I wrote those words 12 years ago the Boston area has become home to tens of thousands of refugees and immigrants. These newcomers are a remarkably diverse group. Newcomers bring with them many talents, skills, energy, wisdom and a very different cultural memory. This cultural memory adds much to the fabric of the community. They cherish their own traditions, language, and values; yet they willingly embrace their adopted country's values and history.

Unfortunately, some of these sentiments are not widely shared. The anti-immigrant wave that is sweeping public policy is, in the eyes of many who believe in social justice, an overt display of a continuing subtext of racism and xenophobia. Discussions of 'English as a Second Language' have associated with them, a thinly disguised veneer of bigotry and prejudice.

The attack on immigrants has had an unexpected by-product. It has coalesced immigrant communities, which are often unconnected and fragmented, into a coherent and increasingly powerful voice crossing lines of race, language, and ethnicity. It has brought forward the documentation of the extraordinary contributions made by immigrants to the benefit of society as a whole. Most importantly, it has created new coalitions across language and culture, including many white Americans who believe that a thriving democracy must welcome the vitality and hope that newcomers bring. The twenty languages spoken at Wainwright Bank are a source of pride and celebration. Indeed there are some among us who while speaking only English, hear the strong cadences of social justice that resonate from other cultures.

We have received many honors through the years but rarely do those accolades come from the mainstream business press. So it was especially gratifying to recently be in New York to receive the 2007 Community Banker of the Year award from the American Banker, the most widely read periodical in the industry. The black-tie awards dinner is attended by a who’s who of the banking community and has been called the “Oscars of banking” by the New York Post. At the podium that night I referred to myself as a social activist disguised as a banker. I went on to say that I hope that Wainwright is long remembered for its advocacy because excellence at Wainwright is not only measured through a shareholder’s lens, but by how we have employed our cultural capital in the struggle for civil liberties and social justice. We are proud to have stood with our clients even when we stood alone.

At the conclusion of my remarks what I will remember most is not the warm embrace of an enthusiastic audience or the gracious remarks of a former Secretary of the Treasury but the comments of an elderly Hispanic hotel worker who approached me as I was leaving. He said he ‘had heard hundreds of business speeches but mine was the only one that touched his heart’.

As I contemplate my own journey it is true that Harvard may have given me my trade but my 25-year association with UMass Boston has given me a unique education that has touched me as well. For that I am profoundly grateful.

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