The New Black Money Men

Ebony, August, 1999

Emerging multimillionaires are writing new script for success

CHESTER C, Davenport and Fredrick B. Clark are among the multimillionaires who are writing a new script for Black financial success stories. Armed with mounds of research, unflagging work ethics and healthy egos, they've struck it rich in boardrooms and courtrooms by tromping into territory others were too intimidated to explore. These new millennium moneymakers represent a breed of entrepreneurs who are leveraging big bucks not through mere affirmative action, but through aggressive action that has corporate America sitting up and taking notice.

On the surface, the two could not be more different.

Davenport's arena is the world of high-flying corporate finance. At 58, he is managing director of Georgetown Partners, a private investment firm in Bethesda, Md., that acquired a 7 percent interest in one of the biggest corporate deals of the year--the $3.3 billion acquisition by GTE Corporation of the Ameritech Corporation's wireless telephone business.

Like most of today's money men, Davenport refuses to discuss the deal or its worth. Industry-watchers, however, estimate that Georgetown's stake in the megamerger is worth more than a whopping $230 million.

It is in the courtroom that Clark, 45, has gained prominence--and a sizable bank account. An attorney in private practice in Greenwood, Miss., Clark was one of the orchestrators of the state of Mississippi's groundbreaking lawsuit against the tobacco industry, the settlement of which netted the state $6.7 billion, with $1.4 billion awarded to the 12 law firms, including Clark's, that handled the case. Clark's take is estimated to be more than $100 million.

While their professional paths seem wildly divergent, beneath the surface, Davenport and Clark present eerily similar profiles. Both are sons of the rural South: Clark, the youngest of 11 children, was reared on a farm in Ackerman, Miss.; Davenport is a product of Athens, Ga. Both had their dreams nurtured in segregated elementary and high schools, and their ambitions stoked in historically Black colleges: Jackson State University for Clark, Morehouse College for Davenport.

And both cut a brilliant swath through the South's most prestigious--and, historically, most racially inhospitable --law schools. Davenport was the first Black student to enroll in the University of Georgia Law School in 1963, where on the first day of class, he discovered that not one of his fellow students would sit within 15 chairs of him. Still, he went on to graduate in the top 5 percent of his class.

Though integration was more entrenched when Clark entered the University of Mississippi Law School in 1975, the atmosphere was no less daunting for students of color. Of the 15 African-Americans who entered law school with him, only five graduated.

Preparation and persistence are also distinguishing characteristics that Davenport and Clark share. After graduating from law school in 1966, Davenport went to work in the appellate section of the Justice Department's tax division, then moved on to the Senate Banking Committee staff as an assistant to Sen. Alan Cranston. Fellow Georgian Jimmy Carter tapped Davenport to work on his presidential campaign in 1976. Upon his election, Carter appointed Davenport assistant secretary of transportation.

The public sector connections Davenport forged in Washington would help lay the groundwork for the private sector riches he would reap later on. Still, there was a tremendous amount of work involved. "Back then, for an African-American, you always had to be the best," he once told the New York Times. "It was ,always, if you're not better than everybody, you're not going to get anything."

Davenport left government in the late 1970s and teamed with real estate mogul Mortimer Zuckerman, who was greatly involved in the redevelopment of much of downtown Washington and environs. That association helped make Davenport a millionaire and paved the way for the formation of Georgetown Partners, which was formed in the late '80s.

The go-go '80s, as the Reagan era of high-yield debt financing became known, was creating new millionaires by the truckload and made the buying and selling of public and privately-held companies the sport of the new money kings.

Through Georgetown Partners, Davenport acquired United Technologies, Inc., a vehicle emissions testing business, for $30 million and re-established it as Envirotest Systems, Corp. "The acquisition of Envirotest was a very important deal," says the Rev. Jesse Jackson, whose Wall Street Project, an initiative to increase minority participation in the world of high finance, was an influential link in Georgetown's involvement in the GTE/Ameritech deal. "What Chester did with Envirotest was work out the fine scientific points of automobile testing and devise the financial structure that allowed him to acquire the company."

Establishing himself as chairman of Envirotest, Davenport oversaw the doubling of the company's revenues (it was generating income of $165 million in 1998) during the five years that it was under his control. But automobile emissions testing is a bumping business, subject to the vagaries of state and federal regulation. In October 1988, Georgetown Partners sold the company for $580 million.