Mikki Taylor said acclaimed author and civil rights leader James Baldwin taught her the difference between a job and a purpose.
It was the 1980s. Baldwin stopped by the offices of Essence magazine, sat down with a group of its editors and told them how privileged they were to do the work they were doing.
Taylor said she never looked at the work the same way again.
The Newark native spent more than three decades at Essence, first as its beauty and cover director and later as editor-at-large. She cast and produced more than 400 covers, featuring everyone from Rosa Parks to Beyoncé. For nearly a decade, she scripted and hosted the Essence Black Women in Hollywood awards, honoring the likes of Oprah Winfrey, Cicely Tyson and Angela Bassett.
None of it, she said, was on anyone’s radar for a girl like her.
“I came of age in Newark at a time when no one was asking little brown girls like me if we wanted to be journalists, authors or producers,” she said.
Taylor said she doesn’t usually tell that story. She told it last week as the keynote speaker at Executive Women of New Jersey’s Salute to the Policy Makers gala, before about 500 people at the Legacy Castle in Pompton Plains.
She had a reason. The 48 women being honored, she said, have already earned their seats at the table. Her charge to them was about what comes next.
She gave the room plenty to write down. Here are a dozen of her best lines:
12. On the first of two lessons from her mother:
“If the best is possible, then good is not enough.”
11. On fitting in:
“Don’t conform, transform.”
10. On challenges of growing up in Newark:
“Possibility does not cease to exist simply because no one has thought to offer it to me.”
9. On why diverse voices matter:
“You cannot fully understand the world when you only listen to a fraction of the people living in it.”
8. On what diversity really means:
“Diversity isn’t simply about who has a seat at the table; it’s about whose voice carries influence, whose vision and perspective informs the decisions and whose leadership impacts the outcome.”
7. On lifting others:
“It’s not about the doors that open for you; it’s about the doors that you swing wide as you walk through.”
6. On courage:
“Don’t simply speak truth to power. Have the conviction to make power answer the truth.”
5. On real change:
“Transformational leadership carries an extraordinary responsibility to ensure that the future is not simply a continuation of the past with different people in charge.”
4. On family and everything else:
“It’s not about having it all. It’s about having what matters.”
3. On what three decades at Essence taught her:
“When you change the image, you challenge the perception. When you challenge the perception, you expand the possibilities, and when you expand the possibilities, you begin to change humanity.”
2. On women in power:
“A woman holding a position of power matters. Don’t get me wrong, but what changes because she holds that position matters just as much.”
1. On the table itself:
“Don’t just diversify the leadership table; change who has the power to set it.”
***
Taylor saved one of her best lines for the honorees themselves, at a private reception before the gala began. Every woman, she told them, eventually reaches a moment when she must decide whether she will keep “asking the world for permission to be her authentic self” or start “giving the world notice of exactly who she is.”
Then she looked around the room.
“And judging by your extraordinary presence,” she said, “a whole lot of notice has been given.”
