Special Series · AT&T and Black America, Part 10 of 12 · September 19, 2026
PART 10 OF 12
Part 9 covered AT&T’s own top-line diversity figures and flagged an open question: does a company-wide percentage tell you anything about who actually holds power inside the company? This installment goes directly to AT&T’s own 2024 proxy statement — the legally required document naming exactly who sits on its board — to answer that for one specific, checkable level of the organization.
AT&T’s own 2024 proxy statement names its Board of Directors’ race and ethnicity, director by director — and of 11 directors, exactly one is Black. This installment covers what AT&T’s own legally required disclosures say about where representation actually stands today, at the level of the company that sets its strategy and hires its CEO.
Key Facts
- AT&T’s 2024 proxy statement’s board diversity matrix lists 11 directors: 9 White, 1 Black (William E. Kennard), and 1 Hispanic (Luis A. Ubiñas) — 18% people of color overall.[1]
- The same board is 27% female (3 of 11 directors) and 73% male.[1]
- AT&T’s own reporting elsewhere states people of color made up 48.7% of its U.S. workforce company-wide in 2022 — nearly three times the board’s 18% figure, though the two numbers come from different years and aren’t a perfectly like-for-like comparison.[2]
- A third-party data aggregator reports AT&T’s overall workforce was specifically 20.2% Black/African American; this piece could not independently verify that exact figure against AT&T’s own primary filing.[3]
The Story So Far
Part 9 ended by noting that a single aggregate “people of color” percentage doesn’t show whether Black employees specifically are concentrated in entry-level roles or represented at senior levels. The board of directors is the one level of the organization where U.S. securities disclosure rules require a company to name exactly who’s there, by race, in a document filed with the SEC. That makes it the most independently checkable data point in this entire series.
What AT&T’s Own Proxy Statement Actually Says
AT&T’s 2024 Notice of Annual Meeting and Proxy Statement includes a board diversity matrix required under Nasdaq listing rules. It names all 11 directors individually, with race/ethnicity and gender coded for each. This piece downloaded and read that matrix directly rather than relying on a secondary summary of it:
| Category | Count | Share of board |
|---|---|---|
| White directors | 9 | 82% |
| Black directors | 1 | 9% |
| Hispanic directors | 1 | 9% |
| Female directors | 3 | 27% |
| Male directors | 8 | 73% |
Source: AT&T Inc., 2024 Notice of Annual Meeting of Stockholders and Proxy Statement, “Director Tenure and Diversity” summary, p. 9.[1]
The one Black director named is William E. Kennard — a former FCC Chairman and former U.S. Ambassador to the European Union, who has chaired AT&T’s board since January 2021.[1] That’s a real, senior, well-credentialed position. It is also, by the numbers, one seat out of eleven.
Comparing the Board to the Company
Part 9 cited AT&T’s own reporting that people of color made up 48.7% of its domestic workforce in 2022. Measured against an 18% people-of-color board in 2024, that’s a large gap — nearly three-to-one — though it’s worth being precise about what’s actually being compared: two different years, one company-wide employment figure covering roughly 100,000-plus employees against an 11-person governance body elected by shareholders under entirely different selection criteria. Those aren’t the same kind of number, and this piece won’t pretend the gap is a clean, single statistic. It is, however, a real and measurable gap between two sets of figures the company itself has published.
What’s Disputed or Unconfirmed
The 20.2% Black-specific workforce figure, reported by a third-party data aggregator, could not be independently verified against AT&T’s own primary EEO-1 filing for this piece — AT&T’s own site blocked automated access when this piece attempted to retrieve the underlying report, the same limitation noted in Part 9. This piece also does not have Black-specific representation data at the senior-executive or management level (as opposed to the full board) — the actual EEO-1 job-category breakdown would be needed to answer that more precisely, and this piece has not obtained it.
How to Verify This Yourself
- AT&T’s 2024 proxy statement in full, including the board diversity matrix on page 9: investors.att.com (PDF).
- The same proxy statement as filed with the SEC, via EDGAR: sec.gov. (SEC.gov blocks generic automated requests without a declared contact User-Agent; a normal browser loads it without issue.)
- AT&T’s SEC filings generally, including its 10-K and proxy statements: SEC EDGAR.
What You Can Do Right Now
- Download AT&T’s proxy statement directly from the link above — the board diversity matrix is on an early page, clearly labeled, and doesn’t require any special access.
- Compare this same disclosure across companies you’re interested in; Nasdaq’s board diversity matrix rule requires the same format from every listed company, which makes direct comparison unusually easy for this one specific data point.
- Follow this series for Part 11, on AT&T’s current DEI programs and the political backlash they’ve faced.
Kemetic Minds Analysis
One Black director out of eleven, at a company whose own reporting claims nearly half its domestic workforce is people of color, is the kind of gap that’s easy to describe in either direction depending on what you want the reader to conclude. It is real progress compared to every era Parts 1 through 4 documented — there was no Black board member, no Black executive, and for decades no Black employee at all in any real number. It is also a gap that shows representation doesn’t rise evenly through an organization just because it exists somewhere in the workforce.
The honest version of this part is the one that resists collapsing into either “AT&T has a diversity problem” or “AT&T has made real progress” as a single verdict. Both are true, at different levels of the same organization, and the board diversity matrix is useful precisely because it’s the one number in this entire series that AT&T itself is legally required to disclose exactly, with no room for a favorable aggregate figure to obscure it.
References
- AT&T Inc. 2024 Notice of Annual Meeting of Stockholders and Proxy Statement, Director Tenure and Diversity, p. 9; director biography, p. 15 [Primary, SEC-required corporate disclosure]. investors.att.com (PDF). ↩
- AT&T. Diversity, Equity & Inclusion, Sustainability Reporting [Primary, company’s own reporting, same source cited in Part 9]. sustainability.att.com. ↩
- GlobalData. AT&T: Racial Diversity in the Leadership [Tertiary, third-party data aggregator; not independently verified against AT&T’s own primary filing for this piece]. globaldata.com. ↩
Related Reading
Investigative methodology: the board diversity matrix figures above were read directly from AT&T’s own 2024 proxy statement PDF, not taken from any secondary summary of it. The 20.2% Black-workforce figure is explicitly flagged as unverified third-party data, not presented with the same confidence as the board matrix. The “Kemetic Minds Analysis” section is this newsroom’s own interpretation, clearly separated from the sourced reporting above it.
Kemetic Minds Editorial Desk
Verified NewsroomPrimary-sourced investigative intelligence on civil rights, voting rights, federal policy, and consumer protection. Sourced from primary legal filings, government statistics, and direct field reporting.