When Chris Womack became the first Black CEO of Southern Co. in 2023, he called the company’s commitment to racial equity one of his guiding principles. His leadership of the third-largest private utility company in the world offered hope of fairer wages and more representative employment for thousands of Black employees and cleaner air and more reasonable energy bills for millions of Black customers across Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi.
In recent years, he has routinely committed to racial equity.
“We cannot get distracted or deterred by divisive politics, or PR distractions that seek to use DEI as boogeyman language to scare, to frighten people,” he said at the American Association of Blacks in Energy National Conference in 2023. “We must defend DEI at every turn.”…