SUSAN L. TAYLOR
Founder & CEO, National CARES Mentoring Movement, and Editor-in-Chief Emeritus, Essence Magazine
By Dina Morrone
It’s an incredible honor for the entire The Eden Magazine team to have Susan L. Taylor grace the cover and answer some questions for us in this extraordinary July issue. She is a woman who exemplifies what it means to have class and grace, and who is Beautiful, with a capital B. Taylor is a woman who’s actions speak loudly. And whose dedication to causes that are dear to her heart keep her focused on the big picture of making a significant difference in people’s lives. She holds a dozen honorary degrees from numerous universities and colleges, and she is a supporter of a host of organizations dedicated to moving the black community forward.
Taylor is the former Editor-in-Chief of Essence Magazine, a philanthropist, bestselling author, journalist, mother, fourth-generation entrepreneur, and founder of The National CARES Mentoring Movement, an organization that helps young African American children through mentorship and inspiration. She is the first African American woman to receive The Henry Johnson Fisher Award from the Magazine Publishers of America. The NAACP has acknowledged Taylor with its President’s Award, and American Libraries referred to her as the “the most influential black woman in journalism today.”
Ms. Taylor, thank you for your time and for sharing your story with our readers around the world.
American Libraries’ referred to you as “the most influential black woman in journalism.” That’s quite an impressive recognition. Congratulations! Who has been the most significant influence in your life? And who inspired you to become the successful woman you are today?
Magazine making as with building any business is a collaborative effort. I am proud that I was able to build a dedicated high-performance team at Essence, and ensure that each person was in the right seat on the bus. I bring to my work the high standards exemplified by my parents and an entrepreneurial family. I observed them building their businesses in the Harlem community of my youth. My father, Lawrence Taylor, opened his women’s boutique, Larry’s Specialty Shop, each morning promptly at 10:00, six days a week, and he didn’t close in the evenings until there were no more customers to serve.
You are the founder & CEO of the National CARES Mentoring Movement. Please tell us about National CARES, and what moved you to start this organization?
National CARES was founded in 2005, in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, as Essence CARES. The hurricane devastated New Orleans, the home of the
Essence Festival, and impoverished Black people were trapped and dying. The world could see that the city’s poor families were defenseless, and the children were traumatized and in desperate need of more support. Speaking about the tragedy throughout the nation and reporting on it in the magazine, appealing to able men and women in the community to assume our moral responsibility, as our fore-parents had done for us, this restorative movement for children was born.
In your twenties, you started your first company, “Nequai Cosmetics.” What inspired you to enter the world of cosmetics?
Nequai Cosmetics was created to fulfill the need for shades of makeup that were unavailable to Black women at that time. Often we had to purchase several shades and mix them to create colors that matched our skin tone. I engaged local chemists who were excited about the new venture and eagerly created the pigments I would custom-blend in my Bronx, New York salon, The Face Place. It caught on quickly, came to the attention of the Essence editors, and I joined the beauty team in 1970, the year the magazine was founded. It’s hard to believe, that was 50 years ago!
You went on to become Editor-in-Chief of one of the most successful magazines, Essence Magazine. What was your primary goal when you first took over the magazine? And what was your parting wish for the magazine when you left?
My goal was to bring our readers’ deepest truths alive on the pages of the magazine—our triumphs, tribulations, our aspirations, the secret places where we hide our hurts, our pain, and wounds that need healing. From its beginning, Essence was required to give more to our readers than many other women’s magazines. That’s because Essence was the only publication dedicated to Black women. The one place where cover to cover our lives were delineated. And our beauty, which had historically been defiled, was celebrated. Self-love was a huge driver for me, our learning to love how God made us, have great reverence for our Blackness and moving us away from colorism. Displaying the breadth of Black beauty was primary. Many of the women we brought to the pages I found in restaurants, on busses and trains, and along the streets because only a narrow representation of our beauty was available through modeling agencies. I made a promise to God to stop traffic if need be and find everyday women with deep, dark skin, women of every shade with Nubian features, and women with full, lush bodies. The goal was to present to our women and the world every manifestation of Black beauty.
When I left Essence to devote my full time to building National CARES, my wish was that the editors I handed the reins to would continue building strong. That they would keep an ear tuned to the hearts of Black women, understand their various needs, and try to serve them. This is what I tried to do in building upon the foundation created by my brilliant predecessor, Marcia Ann Gillespie.
What was the most challenging aspect of being Editor-in-Chief at Essence Magazine and why?
Though I was married for three years before my daughter, Shana, was born, that first marriage ended when she was six weeks old. My greatest challenge throughout my career at the magazine—as beauty editor, then fashion and beauty editor and surely as editor-in-chief—was balancing my giving. Somehow it all worked out. I laugh with my Shana today that “We survived me!” but I do have my regrets. Shana sacrificed so much, more than anyone else, for the success of Essence. She sacrificed having me be more present, and she felt it. So much of my focus was on the magazine and its mission. In retrospect, and as I now know, I could have worked more strategically, focusing on the most important aspects of the work, delegated more, brought more work home, and attended to it with Shana by my side, doing her homework.
So many places around the world are facing poverty. What can we, as individuals, do to help this ever-growing problem?
The coronavirus pandemic that Americans are struggling through is not all doom and gloom, not all loss, stress, and anxiety. It is also an awakening calling us to live differently and with more respect for the gift of this amazing planet and life itself. We human beings are a marvel of creation! We can—with understanding and compassion—push toward a creative model of capitalism that does not demand year-over-year increased profits forevermore as today’s capitalism mandates and which is not sustainable. Today’s model pushes leaders to make immoral choices that destroy the earth, small businesses, family incomes, healthcare systems, and more, expanding the ranks of the poor and causing millions such pain and depression. We human beings are a marvel of creation. Each of us is a miracle. We have the ability to create a better way of living that does not lock people out. We can fix our broken education and healthcare systems. They are among the many entities that have been corrupted by the demand to wring out more and more profit. As costly as healthcare is, Americans rank 27th in the world in health outcomes. We are called to a moral revolution of values that repair the many imbalances.
l to r: Susan L. Taylor and Oprah Winfrey at The National CARE Mentoring Movement Gala held at ESPACE on December 2, 2008 in NYC
National CARES is a mentor-recruitment movement that works ti fill the pipeline of youth-supporting organizations throughout the country with mentors. Its mission is to save a generation by outting a caring adult in the life of every at-risk child and those who have already fallen in peril.
Credit: WENN
Among many Ethnic groups, children are the ones who struggle the most with their daily lives—for example, bullying, poverty, and abuse.
We can push television producers and filmmakers to rethink how they entertain children and adults. Though fear of violence is primary in society, we are a society addicted to violence as entertainment. And that addiction is exploited. Children and grownups are mirroring the meanness, bullying, and carnage that’s often in cartoons, animated films, video games, definitely in network series, and central to blockbuster films. We sit before the TV, watch a bloodbath, then a cheery commercial, back to the bloodbath, and then the heinous violence that leads local news. We are inured to violence and require it for entertainment.
Our education system should teach children to think critically and creatively, not just to remember facts to pass the test. Thinking critically, children won’t just follow the leader and mirror what they see around them. They will question, correct, don’t just follow the hell-raising leader.
What needs to be done to ensure that all children are well educated and safe?
Of the many inequities exposed by Covid-19, none have been more seismic in shattering Black economic stability and progress than the disparities in our education system. Black children are at the bottom of all academic measures. This horrifying pandemic is creating a willingness among some leaders to understand the root cause of Black generational impoverishment. Poverty in schools held fast by centuries of false beliefs about Black intelligence, and disparities in our education system that relegate poor African Americans to illiteracy, unemployment, and over-incarceration. Unlike their middle-class cohorts, poor Black—and Brown—children have little access to quality schools, well-trained teachers, subject-matter experts, exciting curricula, and other academic and social enrichments that instill confidence and prepare young people for self-sufficiency. We created this short video, https://vimeo.com/275132299, to destigmatize and explain the systemic grip of Black poverty and what National is doing to put children and families on pathways to economic stability.
Please share with our readers your beauty and self-help tips for both body and mind?
We can recover our joy if it’s missing from our life. We have to stop thinking about what others did or didn’t do for us, and what we did to ourselves. The only way to peace is being at peace with what is. Judgment separates us from the love in us, makes us cranky and hostile, impacting our total wellbeing, our health, posture, skin, hair, everything. Mind, body, spirit—they’re all connected. Particularly important to us, women, is learning to love what God made. Realizing that each of us is a divine original, we will come to appreciate our uniqueness and make peace with our looks and the bodily and hormonal changes that are natural to aging. There is so much judgment of women’s looks, and it can be punishing to us when we compare ourselves to models and actor’s retouched photos. And when we focus on what’s sagging, bulging, and that we may be well overweight. The power to choose is our superpower. I try to choose self-care each day. It’s not easy, and I don’t always succeed, but it’s critical to give ourselves to ourselves before we give ourselves away. If I could sit and eat whatever and as much as I want, I’d eat cashews all day and never move a muscle. When I do, my belly grows bigger than my butt. I don’t curse myself, understanding the miracle of our body and mind. I engage my will. I toss the cashews, replace them with low-calorie sunflower and pumpkin seeds, drink lots of water, and walk the city for hours while returning calls. What I cherish is that’s it’s never too late to begin again.
You have written several books based on Self-Empowerment. What is the very first step one needs to take to move towards achieving Self-Empowerment?
I’ve learned that quiet time is the most important time we must take. Quiet time to listen in so we can discern what that “still small voice” is whispering to us. It’s mysterious, miraculous, and impossible to discern in the everyday rush of life. But we more easily connect with our innate spiritual wisdom during this coronavirus pandemic, which has caused many to slow down, get anchored, and still. Quiet time is absolutely critical for overwhelmed essential workers. It’s restorative. Just sitting quietly. No special prayers, mantras, rosary beads, or statues needed. Just being present to our breath, it is revealed over time how everything—even what is painful and shameful—works together for the good. How the Holy Spirit, our Creator, is our back and is always moving us toward new possibilities. There is always a challenge around the bend, never for our punishment, always for our learning and development. These blessings may show up in packages that are different from what we wanted or expected. No matter what life sends our way, we must try to remain mindful that we are all stepping toward the Creator, toward goodness, toward God. In our lifetime, if we live long, everything will fall away from us, but nothing is truly lost. It’s just life!
The death of George Floyd, and the outpouring of emotions, peaceful protests, and riots, that followed, has shown the world that Racism is alive and has never really been effectively addressed. It keeps getting kicked down the road and swept under the rug as if it doesn’t exist. How do we take advantage of this epic moment to keep the conversation alive, and the people engaged, as they are doing now so that real change can finally occur? And so that this doesn’t just become another incident, another lost opportunity, or another senseless death of an African American?
There is the need for a moral and spiritual awakening that can only be realized with the courage to tell the truth about the heinous acts of violence that established the nation. These are very hard truths to acknowledge, hard to teach the children, hard to admit that American history has been rewritten to make heroes of people who slaughtered the indigenous peoples, took their land, stole the wealth of the African continent, not just its mineral wealth but also its people, particularly its young people, walked them hundreds of miles shackled and chained, entombed and transported them in the holes of ships across the seas for more than 250 years. To justify such brutality in a Bible-believing land, lies had to be told about us—that we were subhuman, bestial, cannibals that needed to be beaten, tamed, subdued. There is a belief in superiority, in the right to conquer and murder and call it heroism.
All that is punishing to Black and Brown people today rests on these beliefs, which are deeply embedded—even when unconsciously—in the psyches of many non-colored Americans and all the systems that govern our lives—education, healthcare, housing, employment, policing. Hearts will change with an understanding of these hard truths. More than anything, police officers, all need education, truth, to understand what Black people here have withstood over the past 400 years. They need to read Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States and The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism by Edward Baptist; The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson and Tears We Cannot Stop, by Michael Eric Dyson. Books, documentaries, films, historical newspaper articles, stories about lynchings that were White family gathering events, For which they dressed up, brought their children, and served food. Visits to museums, recounts of the Underground Railroad with Black and White folks working together to ensure enslaved Black people’s safe passage to freedom, would be enlightening. These things hold many of the little-know truths of our nation’s history.
Would you like to share a personal story about your own experience in the past when race affected you, your personal life, or your professional life?
In the 1980s there was a fragrance popular among Black women, and while ads appeared in many women’s magazines, it wasn’t advertised in Essence. Our publisher scheduled a meeting with the CEO of the company to make him aware that he was losing a very fertile market and being redundant by duplicating audiences in the home and style magazines targeting White women. The CEO told our publisher that he believed Black women aspired to have things beyond their immediate reach and to advertise in Essence would cause the brand to lose its allure, and that, further, it would lose its currency among White women, which he would not risk. It took another 15 years before that big-brand beauty company would advertise any of its products in Essence Magazine. That signaled for me that racism can override the need for profit.
Special Thanks to:
Susan L. Taylor
Dina Morrone
Regina Fleming Photography
LeVon Leak with ONYXART
Debra Parker
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