Color Lines: Executive Elite In Baton Rouge Include Very Few Black People

A group of business people recently kicked off a campaign to recruit 400 new members to the Greater Baton Rouge Chamber of Commerce, but something was missing from their team of leaders--black people... Phil Klinkner, a professor at Hamilton College in Clinton, New York, specializes in the study of race and government. "Baton Rouge," he said, "is a typical mid-sized American city. If you have executive agencies that are largely lily white, those people have an imperfect ability to understand what is going on in all the segments of the population they serve," Klinker said. "If the people heading up executive agencies aren't connected in with various communities, it will be tough for them."