SON OF FORMER GREEN BERET/FAMOUS MAN WAS RACIALLY PROFILED BY NY POLICE Earl Gilbert Butch Graves, Jr. (born January 5, 1962) is an American businessman and retired basketball player. Born in Brooklyn, New York, he is a Scarsdale High School graduate. Graves, the son of Black Enterprise founder Earl G. Graves, Sr., attended Yale University and earned an MBA from Harvard University. While at Yale he was a member of Skull and Bones[1] and captained the college basketball team. He currently is the all-time leading scorer in Yale mens basketball history and third all-time in Ivy League. He was drafted into the NBA by the Philadelphia 76ers and later played briefly for the Cleveland Cavaliers (1984-85). Graves has worked for Morgan Stanley, as president and CEO of Earl G. Graves Publishing Company, publisher of Black Enterprise, and director of Autozone, Inc. In 1995, Graves was detained and searched by two New York Metro-North Police looking for a suspect who did not resemble Graves in any way except race. The police department publicly apologized and Metro-North Railroad purchased ads featuring a printed apology in three New York newspapers, including The New York Times A COMMUTERS NIGHTMARE When Earl Graves Jr. was growing up in an affluent New York City suburb, his father—the publisher of Black Enterprise magazine—always told his three sons that his greatest concern was that one of them might not make it home one night. Not because of a car accident, Graves Jr. recalls, but because some cop pulled us over and decided it was OK Corral that night. When the younger Graves—a Yale and Harvard Business School alumnus and a Black Enterprise vice president—had his brush with the law last spring, it wasnt fatal, but it still left him angry and humiliated. At 7:30 one morning last May, Graves, dressed in a suit, briefcase in hand, had just arrived at Grand Central Terminal from the Westchester County suburb where he lives with his wife and their 3-year-old son. Suddenly, I felt someone touch me at the elbow, then the other elbow, he says. Two plainclothes police officers flashed their badges. I knew immediately what would happen to me if I resisted, he says, so I stayed calm. The cops asked Graves if he was carrying a gun, then patted him down as he stood, spread-eagle, facing a wall. It was a spectacle, he says. I was facing the wall, my arms up in the air. Anybody could have seen me. When he asked what the cops were looking for, they said he fit the description of a suspect—a black man with short hair. Well, that narrows it down to about 2 million people in the city, he said. You guys have got to be kidding me. The two-minute incident left Graves livid. What they did, he says, well, they would have never done it that way if I had been white. The officers had acted on an anonymous letter received a week earlier from a passenger who claimed that a black man—about 510, with a mustache—regularly carried a concealed gun on the train. Graves, who once played basketball for the Cleveland Cavaliers, is 64 and clean-shaven. Though the railroads president personally apologized—as did the railroad, in several newspaper ads—Graves remains shaken. Im black, he says, and thats all they saw.
Posted on: Sat, 10 Jan 2015 05:22:25 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015