Illinois' Black CPAs: A Century in the Making
2023 marks the 100th anniversary of the licensing of Illinois’ first Black CPA, Arthur J. Wilson. A century later, his legacy continues to make a lasting impact on Illinois, the accounting profession, and the Black CPAs following in his footsteps.
By Teri Saylor | Summer 2023
While John W. Cromwell Jr. indisputably opened the door for Black accountants to become certified public accountants (CPAs) when he became the first one to be licensed in the United States in 1921, Arthur J. Wilson can be credited with paving the way for
further Black CPA success in Illinois and beyond. Wilson, who received his CPA license two years after Cromwell in 1923, was just the second Black CPA licensed in the U.S. and the first to earn the coveted CPA credential in Illinois. Wilson’s life
story, and the legacy he leaves behind, may be best viewed through the lens of the careers he helped launch and the impact he made, not only on the accounting profession but also on Illinois and the City of Chicago.
Chicago’s Role in Growing Black-Owned
Businesses
Chicago’s emergence as a major center of professional accountancy began during the 1890s, but it was around the turn of the 20th century that things began to change dramatically. More than 90% of the nation’s Black population had
been living in the segregated South, where they were excluded from the economy in many ways. Starting around 1910, more than 6 million people moved to the North and West, with many settling in the Windy City. By the end of the first decade of the 20th
century, Chicago had become fertile ground for Black business owners and professional service providers who had arrived during the Great Migration.
“Life was better in Chicago than almost anywhere else in the United States,” says San Francisco
State University Professor Theresa A. Hammond, Ph.D., author of “A White-Collar Profession: African American Certified Public Accountants Since 1921.” “African Americans found jobs that hadn’t been available in the South, and they
were able to start businesses.”
One neighborhood of importance was the South Side’s Bronzeville. Bronzeville was an established Black neighborhood that had surpassed a resident population of 100,000 by 1920.
“Bronzeville was literally
a city within a city,” says John E. Adams, CPA, controller at Infrastructure Engineering in Chicago. Home to hundreds of retail shops, doctors’ offices, funeral homes, and small mom-and-pop businesses, Bronzeville’s economy was further
boosted by factories like Joe Louis Milk Company and Parker House Sausage, as well as large, national brands, including Fuller Brush Company and Johnson Publishing Company (publisher of JET and EBONY magazines).
“These were companies that needed
CPAs, and they provided Black accountants with important opportunities, because even into the 1950s and 1960s, the then Big Eight accounting firms were reluctant to hire African Americans,” Adams says.
To accommodate its growing local economy, Bronzeville
also fostered insurance companies, banks, and credit unions, including Binga State Bank, the first privately-owned African American financial institution in Chicago. The bank helped many Black-owned businesses grow and provided important employment opportunities
for Chicago’s emerging class of Black leaders—among them was Wilson, who served as the bank’s vice president and head cashier at the time.
A Career That Spawned Generations of Black CPAs
In her book, Hammond traces Wilson’s career,
starting in the early 1920s when he passed an exam qualifying him for a job with the IRS. However, the agency wouldn’t hire African Americans at that time, so he set his sights on a new direction—obtaining a CPA license and starting his own
accounting business.
At that time, Illinois hadn’t yet instituted an experience requirement for taking the CPA exam or being licensed, so Wilson was able to sit for the exam, pass it, and open his own accounting practice where he did taxes for many
small business owners at night while working at Binga State Bank during the day. It wasn’t until 1927, four years after Wilson was licensed, that Illinois’ State Board of Accountancy adopted an experience requirement, which created a major
obstacle for aspiring Black CPAs, as essentially no whiteowned organizations would hire Black professionals, denying many of them the work experience needed to become licensed CPAs.
During an era of seemingly insurmountable race-related obstacles, Wilson
began dedicating his life’s work to helping other Black accountants and aspiring CPAs succeed. “Arthur Wilson was key in Illinois because he mentored so many accounting professionals,” Hammond notes. Perhaps most crucially, he’s
credited with hiring and mentoring Mary T. Washington Wylie as an assistant at Binga State Bank, who would later become another prominent figure in Chicago’s Black history.
Then Wall Street crashed in 1929, sending banks and businesses into disarray,
including Binga State Bank. Following the bank’s collapse in 1930, Wilson went on to work as an accountant for the state of Illinois, but he continued to mentor young Black accountants at his small practice and used his position as a prominent member
of the Black community to promote racial equality.
With Wilson’s encouragement, for example, Washington Wylie enrolled in an accounting program at Northwestern University and graduated in 1941. She apprenticed with Wilson to officially fulfill her
work experience requirement and went on to earn her CPA license in Illinois in 1943, establishing her as the country’s, and therefore Illinois’, first female Black CPA.
Like Wilson, Washington Wylie had started her own evening-hours accounting
practice, operating out of a South Side basement, to serve the Black community.
And, much like Wilson, Washington Wylie spent the rest of her life shepherding other young Black accountants into their own careers as she grew her basement practice into
a prominent Chicago-based, black-owned accounting firm.
Washington Wylie Changed Lives
Washington Wylie is known for treating her employees as if they were part of her family, but at the same time, insisting they work hard and deliver excellent results.
This is especially true for Hiram L. Pittman, Washington Wylie’s first employee. Pittman ultimately became a partner of the firm in 1952, forming Washington & Pittman. Notably, Pittman was also No. 19 on the list of the first 100 Black CPAs.
Hammond says it’s hard to imagine the barriers they had to overcome, but the thing that really stands out about Chicago’s Black CPAs is how much they helped each other. She notes that Washington Wylie helped build a community.
A part of that
community was Lester H. McKeever Jr., CPA, JD, partner at Mitchell & Titus LLP and a founding member of the CPA Endowment Fund of Illinois. McKeever earned his CPA license in 1960, placing him at No. 61 on the list of the first 100 Black CPAs. He
says Washington Wylie’s challenging but supportive training techniques changed his life, and her adherence to perfection taught him discipline.
“Working for Washington Wylie, you didn’t make any mistakes, because if you did, you had to start over, and the lessons I learned from that experience just kept me moving forward,” he says. McKeever became a partner at the firm in 1960 and managing partner in 1976, forming Washington, Pittman & McKeever LLC. The day Washington Wylie retired is still fresh in McKeever’s mind: “Our firm gave her a bracelet with about 30 charms bearing the names of all the accountants she had nurtured to become CPAs.”
At 89, McKeever isn’t quite ready to rest on his laurels, pen his memoir, or cap his long career, of which some notable highlights include serving as chairman of the Chicago Federal Reserve and closing the acquisition of Washington, Pittman & McKeever by Mitchell & Titus in 2018. Today, Mitchell & Titus is the largest minority-controlled accounting, tax, and advisory firm in the U.S. Still working part time as a partner in the firm, McKeever says he’s content to cement his lineage in a long line of trailblazing accountants who rose to prominence in Chicago on the influence of those who came before him.
Though, despite the hard work of his forefathers, McKeever acknowledges progress has been slow. Starting with Cromwell in 1921, it took 44 years for just 100 Black accountants to become licensed CPAs, 27 of which were licensed in Illinois.
Paving the Way for Tomorrow’s Black CPAs
Across the nearly half-century it took for just the first 100 Black CPAs to be licensed, the Big Eight accounting firms continued their reluctance to hire Black CPAs. Then, even among the firms open to hiring Black CPAs, Adams notes the firms’ clients often didn’t want Black people working on their engagements. Though, Adams says that began to change after passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act: “By the early 1970s, African Americans began getting jobs at some of the major CPA firms in Chicago.”
Adams, who received his CPA license in 1978, originally set out to become a lawyer. After working at a law firm during a high school summer program, advice from one of the attorneys changed his trajectory. “I asked him to recommend a good subject to major in to become a lawyer, and speaking as a sole practitioner, he told me he would have majored in accounting so he could keep his own financial records,” Adams recalls.
Adams took that advice to heart, and after graduating from St. John’s University in Minnesota, he passed the CPA exam on his first try, returned to Chicago, and went to work for Arthur Young, eager to build upon Chicago’s Black business legacy. At the top of his to-do list was meeting other Black CPAs. He reached out to the National Association of Black CPAs only to learn the association lacked a Chicago chapter, so he helped start one.
More recently, June 2020 saw the launch of the National Society of Black Certified Public Accountants Inc. in Chicago, whose mission is “to increase the number of Black CPAs by providing the most relevant knowledge, resources, and advocacy; and to promote cultural competence, diversity, and inclusion within the profession.”
Despite both historic and recent efforts, growth among Black CPAs has shown slow advancement over the years. In its 2022 Insight Special Feature, “A CPA Diversity Report: Uncovering the Barriers to Success,” the Illinois CPA Society (ICPAS) called attention to the imbalance and inequity persisting within the profession. Of note, the report highlights that 12.4% of the U.S. population is Black, according to the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2020 census. Yet, according to the AICPA’s “2021 Trends” report released in early 2022, the Black population of CPAs in U.S. CPA firms is only 2%.
Adams, McKeever, and Hammond all agree with the society’s position that there’s much more work to be done to improve diverse representation, and it starts with youth and changing the perception of the CPA profession.
“The reality is not much has changed,” Adams says. “If you compare the numbers today to 10 or 20 years ago, they’re not dramatically different.” He believes progress will take involvement from major corporations and CPA firms to be more grassroots oriented. “We’re going to need to get out into the schools and promote the profession to kids because we have to spark their interest when they’re young.”
For McKeever, who owes his career to Washington Wylie, establishing an endowment fund in her memory focused on advancing diversity in the profession was the best way he could honor her legacy. The Mary T. Washington Wylie Opportunity Fund was created in 2005 through a collaboration with ICPAS and the CPA Endowment Fund of Illinois. The named fund supports scholarships and development opportunities that encourage and prepare Black and other underrepresented minorities to become CPAs. Its prized program is the award-winning Mary T. Washington Wylie Internship Preparation Program, which helps place minority college students in the accounting profession by providing access to training, resources, scholarships, and mentors. At the end of the program, employers interview participants for a variety of paid internships that could lead to full-time jobs.
“The internships lead to students’ success,” McKeever says. “Every state looking to increase diversity should have some kind of internship program, because out of those internships come jobs that might not be available otherwise.”
Wilson seemingly understood this a century ago. Today, if Wilson was still alive, McKeever says he would give him a simple thank you. “Arthur Wilson was bigger than life for many of us in the profession, and even if we didn’t know him personally, we knew who he was,” McKeever says. “We all owe him a tremendous debt of gratitude.”
As McKeever sees it, working for Washington Wylie brought Wilson to life, and painted the picture of what it was like to work for him. “I think his personality was a lot like Washington Wylie’s. They doubled down on their efforts to make sure there was good in our profession and among the Black community.”
Hammond, with the wealth of knowledge she amassed while writing her book on the history of the first Black CPAs, agrees, noting that “Washington Wylie always had an open door to train anyone who walked through it, and a lot of people did.”
“Arthur Wilson is the one who gave Washington Wylie the experience she needed to become a CPA and mentor so many others who went on to be successful after her,” she says. “Without him being sort of the grandfather of all those early Black CPAs, that might never have happened.”
In other words, Illinois’—and more specifically Chicago’s—rich Black CPA history can all be traced back to Wilson and his historic achievement of becoming Illinois’ first Black CPA 100 years ago.
Teri Saylor is a Raleigh, N.C.-based writer with experience covering a range of topics from business to lifestyles. She’s also a frequent contributor to AICPA’s FM Magazine and Journal of Accountancy.
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