Baruch College has both the largest business college and the most diverse campus in the nation. By virtue of these two facts, the ethnic variety of Baruch College's accounting student body gives a distorted view of the profession across the country. Less than 1 percent of certified public accountants in the United States are African American—a far lower number than the percentage of African American doctors and lawyers—and as Professor Theresa A. Hammond reveals in her new book, A White-Collar Profession: African-American Certified Public Accountants Since 1921, the roots of the problem lay in the profession's unusual history of segregation.

Hammond, an associate professor of accounting and the Ernst & Young Research Fellow in Diversity Studies at Boston College, recounts the ways in which African Americans were excluded from the profession by state laws, employer discrimination, and the reluctance of clients to work with black accountants.

Hammond begins the book with the example of Theodora Fonteneau Rutherford, a 1923 summa cum laude graduate of Howard University and Columbia University's Graduate School of Business, whose story typified the struggle of even the most talented aspiring African American accountants. Rutherford was by all accounts a brilliant student, but her classmates at Columbia were unwilling to befriend her at a time when social segregation was still the norm. Two classmates were bold enough to become her study partners, but even they, Rutherford discovered, bowed to social pressures and ate their lunch at white-only restaurants.

Armed with her Ivy League graduate education—a superior qualification that should have made her an attractive prospect for even the most prestigious accounting firms—Rutherford found that no firm in New York would help her fulfill the apprenticeship required to take the CPA examination. Racism deferred her dream of being a CPA for 37 years. It wasn't until 1960 that she would find work as a practicing accountant.

Hammond credits the efforts of CUNY alumnus Audley Coulthurst and Baruch graduate Bert Mitchell ('63) with changing the institutional culture of discrimination in corporate accounting. In particular, she cites several of Mitchell's articles in which he discussed the shortage of black accountants and proposed new methods of increasing their numbers.

Mitchell graduated with an accounting degree from Baruch in 1963 and had been able to garner some experience in the field with the help of small, Jewish-owned firms that, in Hammond's words, were "more likely to sympathize with the experiences of African-Americans and to help them find employment." Though Mitchell had graduated at the top of his class, his efforts to find a job with one of the Big 8 firms in Manhattan echoed Rutherford's experiences almost four decades earlier. He contacted—and was refused by—25 firms, each one ascribing the decision to their clients' reluctance to work with an African American accountant. Though he eventually succeeded in becoming the first black accountant at J.K. Lasser & Company, Mitchell never forgot his experience and used it to fuel his landmark study of discrimination in the field, published in the Journal of Accounting in October 1969.

Coulthurst, despite his own corporate success, also found himself caught up in the era's spirit of social change. He went to work for the National Urban League in 1965, leaving a hard-won position at Lucas & Tucker because "I figured that the students were sitting in at the lunch counters, getting their heads whipped and getting dogs sicced on them … but the skills I had as a CPA [meant that] I could contribute to the movement by working for the league, and helping the league raise the funds that would [support] these activities."

Unearthing the unpleasant history of African Americans in accounting required first-person interviews with many pioneers, who had never had the opportunity to tell their stories in print. Hammond spent 10 years traveling all over the country to conduct interviews with the aged and ailing pioneers profiled in the book, and her admiration for their courage and determination shines through the text. Admirably, her interest in the lingering problem of African American underrepresentation in the accounting field goes beyond commemorating the figures in her book; in 1994, she helped establish the African-American Accounting Doctoral Students Association (now known as the PhD Project Accounting Doctoral Students Association), along with Zicklin School Dean John Elliott. —OF