Business Diversity Meeting

This committee is developing a plan of action for the Chamber to reach out and partner with select groups. Their Mission – Build a culture of awareness and appreciation for diversity in Chandler’s business community, by removing barriers of communication and creating opportunities to achieve business success.
Our speaker will be Coy Payne, Former Mayor and Councilmember; City of Chandler
Change was needed because of the segregation faced by Coy Payne and other Blacks. Early life in Chandler was spent with his sharecropper father and family when they moved from a cotton camp in Eloy. Payne’s father thought that picking cotton would afford the family a better life. “My father had dreams for us, and cotton became our livelihood.” Picking cotton only offered hardship, strenuous work, bruised hands and sometimes missed schooling. Working in cotton fields only offered separateness and segregation. Segregation prevented him from attending the high school in his own community, so he traveled the one-hour bus route every day to Carver High School in downtown Phoenix. After graduating, Payne could not get a job in Chandler.

From militancy to passivity, Coy C. Payne served fifteen years as a member of the Chandler City Council and two terms as the city’s Mayor from 1990 to 1994. Back in the sixties, Payne like others, wanted to march in the streets, throw stones and burn buildings but he quickly realized that change would only come from being on the inside. He changed his mind from militancy and began volunteering with the City Council and various boards and commissions. This move gave him the opportunity to influence change and the making of policies. Payne was instrumental in leading the negotiations for the construction of the recently opened Chandler Fashion Center.

Coy C. Payne made the greatest move in his life when he left the cotton fields to pursue his ambitions. Besides his accomplishment of becoming mayor of Chandler he also became Arizona’s first African-American mayor. In addition, Payne is proud of the fact that he became an educator who was able to affect the lives of many young people. For his contribution in education the gymnasium at the Chandler High School was named in his honor.

Reflecting on his history, Coy C. Payne offers these words of wisdom, “We all are what we can become or what we might have been. Whatever or wherever circumstances we are born under it is very important that early in our lives that we be optimistic to the things that we can do to better our circumstances, our lives and then what we can do to bring those around us along. It is not how high you go but how many you bring with you.”
© Lyda Y. Harris