Earl Gilbert "Butch" Graves Jr. (born January 5, 1962) is an American businessman and retired

basketball Basketball is a team sport in which two teams, most commonly of five players each, opposing one another on a rectangular Basketball court, court, compete with the primary objective of #Shooting, shooting a basketball (ball), basketball (appr ...

player. Born in

Brooklyn, New York Brooklyn () is a borough of New York City, coextensive with Kings County, in the U.S. state of New York. Kings County is the most populous county in the State of New York, and the second-most densely populated county in the United States, be ...

, he is a

Scarsdale High School Scarsdale High School (SHS) is a public high school in Scarsdale, New York, United States, a coterminous town and village in Westchester County, New York. It is a part of the Scarsdale Union Free School District. The school was founded in 1917. ...

graduate.

Background

Graves, the son of Barbara Graves, and ''

Black Enterprise ''Black Enterprise'' is a black-owned multimedia company. Since the 1970s, its flagship product ''Black Enterprise'' magazine has covered African-American businesses with a readership of 3.7 million. The company was founded in 1970 by Earl G ...

'' founder

Earl G. Graves Sr. Earl Gilbert Graves Sr. (January 9, 1935 – April 6, 2020) was an American entrepreneur, publisher, businessman, philanthropist, and advocate of African-American businesses. A graduate of Morgan State University, he was the founder of ''Blac ...

, attended

Yale University Yale University is a private research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Established in 1701 as the Collegiate School, it is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and among the most prestigious in the wo ...

and earned an

MBA A Master of Business Administration (MBA; also Master's in Business Administration) is a postgraduate degree focused on business administration. The core courses in an MBA program cover various areas of business administration such as accounti ...

from

Harvard University Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of higher le ...

. While at Yale he was a member of

Skull and Bones Skull and Bones, also known as The Order, Order 322 or The Brotherhood of Death, is an undergraduate senior secret student society at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. The oldest senior class society at the university, Skull and Bone ...

and captained the

college basketball In United States colleges, top-tier basketball is governed by collegiate athletic bodies including National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics (NAIA), the United States Collegiate Athleti ...

team. He currently is the all-time leading scorer in Yale men's basketball history and third all-time in

Ivy League The Ivy League is an American collegiate athletic conference comprising eight private research universities in the Northeastern United States. The term ''Ivy League'' is typically used beyond the sports context to refer to the eight schools ...

. He was drafted into the

NBA The National Basketball Association (NBA) is a professional basketball league in North America. The league is composed of 30 teams (29 in the United States and 1 in Canada) and is one of the major professional sports leagues in the United St ...

by the

Philadelphia 76ers The Philadelphia 76ers, colloquially known as the Sixers, are an American professional basketball team based in the Philadelphia metropolitan area. The 76ers compete in the National Basketball Association (NBA) as a member of the league's Eas ...

and later played briefly for the

Cleveland Cavaliers The Cleveland Cavaliers (often referred to as the Cavs) are an American professional basketball team based in Cleveland. The Cavaliers compete in the National Basketball Association (NBA) as a member of the league's Eastern Conference (NBA), Ea ...

( 1984–85). He was also drafted by the

Dallas Cowboys The Dallas Cowboys are a professional American football team based in the Dallas–Fort Worth metroplex. The Cowboys compete in the National Football League (NFL) as a member club of the league's National Football Conference (NFC) East divisi ...

. Graves has worked for

Morgan Stanley Morgan Stanley is an American multinational investment management and financial services company headquartered at 1585 Broadway in Midtown Manhattan, New York City. With offices in more than 41 countries and more than 75,000 employees, the fir ...

, as president and CEO of Earl G. Graves Publishing Company, publisher of ''Black Enterprise'' magazine, and director of Autozone, Inc. In 1995, Graves was detained and searched by two

New York Metro-North Police The Metropolitan Transportation Authority Police Department (MTAPD) is the police agency of New York's Metropolitan Transportation Authority Officers of the MTAPD are fully empowered under the New York State Public Authorities Law and are com ...

looking for a suspect who did not resemble Graves in any way except race. The police department publicly apologized and

Metro-North Railroad Metro-North Railroad , trading as MTA Metro-North Railroad, is a suburban commuter rail service run by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), a New York State public benefit corporations, public authority of the U.S. state of New Yor ...

purchased ads featuring a printed apology in three New York newspapers, including ''

The New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid ...

''. On July 22, 2009, Graves stated to the media that "there's nothing post-racial about U.S.", as he responded to the arrest of Harvard professor

Henry Louis Gates Henry Louis "Skip" Gates Jr. (born September 16, 1950) is an American literary critic, professor, historian, and filmmaker, who serves as the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of the Hutchins Center for African and African Am ...

. In February 2021, Graves said that the biggest challenge for African-American entrepreneurs is scale, and that 96 percent of Black-owned businesses are sole-proprietorships. "We need to take our respective resources mong multiple founders and investorsand work together to build companies that can attract major customers. Microbusinesses can’t do that on their own."

Notes

References

* "Earl G. Graves Jr." ''Who's Who Among African Americans'', 20th edn. Gale, 2007.

External links

* * * * * {{DEFAULTSORT:Graves, Earl G. Jr. 1962 births Living people African-American basketball players Cleveland Cavaliers players Harvard Business School alumni People from Scarsdale, New York Philadelphia 76ers draft picks Point guards Shooting guards Basketball players from Brooklyn Basketball players from Westchester County, New York Yale Bulldogs men's basketball players Scarsdale High School alumni Morgan Stanley employees American men's basketball players 21st-century African-American people 20th-century African-American sportspeople