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- Board history. Do you know who the first Black woman to sit on the board of a large U.S. public company was?
Until recently, most people relying on Google would have answered that question incorrectly. The search engine says it's Dolores Wharton. In fact, the woman who held the distinction was Patricia Roberts Harris. Harris was the U.S. ambassador to Luxembourg in the 1960s. In the 1970s, she served as secretary of housing and urban development; in the 1980s, she worked as U.S. secretary of health and human services. In 1971, she was elected to the board of IBM.
But Harris's history-making directorship had been buried in corporate records, causing the Internet to overlook her story.
The organization Black Women on Boards unearthed Harris's piece of corporate history two years ago, and the discovery is now a focus of the new documentary OnBoard. My colleague Lila MacLellan, author of Fortune's Modern Board newsletter, writes about the film in a new Fortune piece.
Harris was followed by executives like Wharton, who joined the boards of Kellogg and Phillips Petroleum in 1976.
Their legacy is clear; today Black directors hold 12% of Fortune 500 board seats, and, of all demographic groups, Black women have experienced the largest increase in appointments since 2020. Organizations like Black Women on Boards, launched by Merline Saintil (on the boards of Rocket Lab and GitLab) and Robin Washington (a director at Salesforce, Alphabet, and Honeywell), have helped maintain that momentum.
OnBoard premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival last week. For more about the documentary, read Lila's full story here.
Emma Hinchliffe
emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com
@_emmahinchliffe
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