Virgis Colbert: corporate executive with a mission

A lot of successful Black executives pay lip service to the often-repeated concept of giving back to the community. But for far too many, "giving back" means little more than making once-a-year excursions to an inner-city high school on career day.

Virgis Colbert is different.

Colbert, vice president in charge of plant operations at Miller Brewing Co., and one of the highest ranking Black executives in corporate America, believes that the price of prodigious achievement is the obligation to give generously of your time, money and expertise to ensure that other Blacks will follow in your footsteps.

The "Black tax" is what he and a few of his peers have dubbed this responsibility, and Colbert pays more than his fair share. In addition to deftly handling the day-to-day pressures of performing his job as chief of Miller's plant operations--a challenging and multifaceted position that places him in charge of a workforce of 8,000 people in plants throughout the country, including Milwaukee, site of Miller's corporate headquarters--he also juggles a demanding schedule of community service commitments to which he is equally dedicated.

He sits on several of Milwaukee's most active civic committees, each designed to address the yawning problems of the inner-city. He also works vigorously for the executive advisory council of the National Urban League's Black Executive Exchange Program and the national industrial advisory council of Opportunities Industrialization Centers of America, Inc., an organization that provides vital technical skills to people who through lack of training have been shut out of the workforce.

But it is in the area of education that Colbert has invested both heart and soul. With Miller President and CEO Leonard Goldstein, he helped establish and does occasional volunteer duty for the Milwaukee Tutorial Program, an after-school project that provides snacks and academic assistance to third-graders who are bused to Miller's corporate headquarters from a nearby public school.

And he has been one of the biggest boosters of the Thurgood Marshall Scholarship Fund, a cooperative effort founded in 1987 by Miller in partnership with the Office for the Advancement of Public Black Colleges. The fund provides merit scholarships to the nation's 36 historically Black public colleges and universities.

As one of Miller's senior line officers and an advisor to the company's president on a number of issues--from civic activities to profit and loss strategies--Colbert has helped establish the overall direction of the scholarship fund, which Miller has supported through cash contributions and in-kind services of between $1.6 and $2 million since its inception.

Colbert says his involvement with the scholarship fund--as well as his extensive commitment of time and energy to other volunteer organizations--does not begin to repay the debt that he and all Black executives owe to the countless people who marched, staged sit-ins and endured immeasurable indignities so that he could have a place in the executive suite.

"I've worked very hard and I think the result of that is that I've achieved a certain amount of success," he says. "But I also realize that I'm not here just because Virgis Colbert is so great. I'm here because of the Civil Rights Movement and those people on the front line who fought and bled and even died so that I could have a piece of the American Dream. So far me, this thing about the 'Black tax' means that those of us who've been fortunate enough to have the doors of corporate America opened to us owe something to the community that made us what we are."

But Colbert, 51, is not motivated solely by obligation. He is propelled by a deep-seated inner drive that pushes him to be the best at whatever he attempts.

The drive, he says, is a legacy inherited from his late father, Quillie, a factory worker, who used the family truck to start his own small-scale, part-time hauling business in Toledo, Ohio, and earn enough money to provide for his wife, Eddie Mae, and 10 children.

His father's industriousness made an indelible impression on Virgis, the youngest of the Colbert children. "Though I was 13 when my father died, he was always a hero to me," he says. "His discipline and his work ethic are what have motivated me through the years."

Still, as a child growing up in Toledo, where he was born, there were not a lot of signs guiding Colbert on the path lot of signs guiding Colbert on the path his life eventually would take. Early on, he'd toyed with the notion of becoming an attorney. But after one unremarkable year at the University of Toledo, he dropped out of college and eventually gravitated to a job at Chrysler's Toledo machining plant.

After a few small promotions, he realized that his train would be forever stalled on the low-level supervisory track unless he obtained a college degree. While working for Chrysler, he earned a bachelor of science degree in industrial management from Central Michigan University and began a steady climb up Chrysler's management ladder through the 1970s, culminating in his ascent to general superintendent of operations in 1977.