Leading With Purpose: Black Men Share Their Paths to PR Leadership

There are many African Americans “who don’t even know that PR and communications jobs exist, let alone that African Americans are working in these positions,” Artis Twyman said. “I want to help educate and expose as many people to this field as I can.”

Twyman, vice president of communications for the Los Angeles Rams, was one of four communications executives on The PRSA Foundation’s April 30 webinar titled, “From Talk to Action: Attracting More Black Men to the Field of PR and Communications.”

A native of Gary, Ind., Twyman attended Tennessee State University, where he majored in speech communications. He later earned his master’s degree in communications from Middle Tennessee State University.

“I fell in love with the storytelling, with the writing, with the strategic messaging and working with the media,” he said. “Now it’s 25 years later, and I’m here with the Rams in Los Angeles. It’s been a really fun run.”

Panelist Dana Bolden, APR, is the chief communications officer for Colgate-Palmolive in New York. “I started as a television journalist in West Palm Beach,” he said. “But I quickly realized that in television news, you really couldn’t tell a complete story. You had a very compact time period. I did not know that PR was even a field at the time. But PR people had pitched stories to me as a TV journalist. I realized there was this craft, and so I joined an agency.”

Bolden later worked at Coca-Cola, where he gravitated to financial and policy communications. He then did PR work for two startup companies before joining Colgate-Palmolive.

Panelist Damon Jones, chief communications officer at Procter & Gamble, grew up in Detroit. After earning a degree in communications and journalism from Xavier University in Cincinnati, “a soap company came knocking,” he said. They asked him, “Would you ever consider a job in communications and public relations?”

At first, Jones thought: “What is there to communicate about laundry and soap? Can it really be that interesting? But the more I learned, I was intrigued by how all of these elements came together to convince people to take an action or to have a belief. And that has been the thing that has stuck with me — the ability to tell a convincing story, to make a convincing argument. “

When offered a job at Procter & Gamble, “I didn’t know a lot about public relations at the time, but I gave it a try,” Jones said. “And 28 years later, here I am.”

Attracting Black men to PR ‘a two-way street’

Thomas Bennett III, senior vice president in the Dallas office of FleishmanHillard — and 2025 president of the PRSA Foundation — moderated the discussion. The PRSA Foundation provides scholarships, grants and internships for diverse students seeking careers in PR and communications.

Bennett asked how the panelists have overcome racial biases in their communications careers.

“Fortunately for me, I didn’t really experience any bias until I got into a CCO role,” Bolden said. “And then I started realizing that if we were debating issues [and] I got to be emotional or displayed some passion, I was the angry Black guy in the room. That took me aback.”

But in general, as someone with a seat at the leadership table, “I can’t say that I was disadvantaged or biased,” Bolden said.

To avoid biases, “I always try to let my work speak for me,” Twyman said. Jones said the only bias he’s encountered in his communications career was “because I don’t always look as old as I am, or a senior as I have been.”

For other Black men who are in PR or thinking of joining the profession, Jones said, “Understand what you’re good at. What is your special power?”

Attracting more Black men to public relations “is a two-way street,” Twyman said. “Colleges and universities need to be sure they’re exposing students to these opportunities and equipping them with the right skills to attain these jobs. And it’s our responsibility as PR professionals to help educate and expose people to these opportunities.”

After the session, Bennett said: “The PRSA Foundation provides scholarships and grants for diverse college students pursuing a career in the PR and communications. Programs like this webinar continue our efforts to talk about the lack of diversity in our profession and ways we can make it more diverse and inclusive than what it is today.”

Illustration credit: onchira

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