TIAA is the first company in Fortune 500 history to have two Black CEOs in a row

Retirement and investment management firm TIAA said Thursday that JPMorgan Chase & Co. executive Thasunda Brown Duckett would become its new chief executive and president on May 1, marking the first time a Fortune 500 company has handed the reins directly from one Black chief executive to another.

Duckett becomes the second Black woman to earn a major corner office job this year after Walgreens Boots Alliance in January named Starbucks executive Rosalind “Roz” Brewer as its next CEO.

Duckett will succeed Roger W. Ferguson Jr., one of just four current Black CEOs in the Fortune 500, who had previously announced his retirement. In early February, Merck said CEO Kenneth Frazier, one of those four, would be retiring from the pharmaceutical giant.

The handoff from one Black CEO to another within the Fortune 500 is a notable first that may finally signal the market is recognizing the number of experienced Black executives who have run operational business units of their own.

As CEO of Chase’s Consumer Banking, Duckett has overseen more than 40,000 employees and $600 billion in deposits.

“This is a major moment,” Michael Hyter, incoming president and CEO of the Executive Leadership Council, an advocacy group for Black executives, said in an interview. “A new norm can form when things like this occur.”

Hyter said Duckett is a “really well-qualified, ready, proven executive” and, like Starbucks’ Brewer, “represents the embodiment” of the kind of executives who’ve managed large operational businesses that are seen as necessary steppingstones to the chief executive’s job.

The Executive Leadership Council said Kaiser Permanente CEO Bernard J. Tyson, who died in 2019, was succeeded by another Black CEO, Greg Adams. But because Kaiser is not a Fortune 500 corporation, TIAA’s succession “is the only Black CEO to Black CEO transition of this magnitude of which we are aware,” a spokeswoman said in an email.

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