Grenada, Mississippi, Summer 1966.
Malcolm Gissen, founder and CEO of financial advisory firm Malcolm H. Gissen and Co., will never forget that time. Gissen, then a student at the University of Wisconsin Law School, volunteered to venture into the deepest part of the southern United States as part of a committee set up by President John F. Kennedy to provide legal assistance to blacks who had no access to it otherwise.
He got to Grenada on a Sunday night and immediately, was thrown into the flaming cauldron that was Mississippi. By day, he listened to their tales of horror and pleaded for jailed black men and women; by night, he and several others in Mississippi for the same purpose, joined rallies and marches and dodged KKK bullets. Every morning, they faced fresh threats from the Klan. "I was so affected by everything I saw and experienced, that when I left Mississippi and went back to law school, I was very uncomfortable around Whites," Gissen says. "I lived with blacks for a long time after that."
Many years have gone by since that time and while race relations will always be an issue in a country where slavery was institutionalized, great progress has been made. Yet Gissen–who's extremely sensitive to race and is "always looking around me, whether it be at financial advisory conferences or at the symphony to see whether people of all colors are represented"–is disappointed at how few blacks there are in the financial planning world, both on the client and on the advisor side.
