Black Woman-Owned Construction Company to Build New Terminals at JFK and Laguardia Airports

*McKissack & McKissack, headed by president and CEO Cheryl McKissack Daniel, is the oldest Black-owned and female-run construction company in the US. They are also the firm behind the new construction taking place at LaGuardia Airport and the new Terminal One at JFK.

As reported by CBS News, “in the male dominated world of construction, McKissack Daniel’s business is assigned to just about every major infrastructure improvement project financed by the city and state of New York.”

The family owned and operated business “dates back more than two centuries to a Tennessee slave named Moses,” the outlet writes. 

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Read an Interview With Cheryl McKissack Daniel, Construction Manager at Columbia’s Manhattanville Campus via @nytimes https://t.co/KA5yGXmG

— Columbia University (@Columbia) February 13, 2013

Here’s the company’s backstory via blackbusiness.com:

In 1905, McKissack Daniel’s grandfather Moses McKissack, a former slave, founded the family business after learning the trade of making bricks. Since then, they built different buildings, homes, hospitals, including the Tuskegee Air Force Base where Black pilots trained to desegregate World War II.

Her father, William DeBerry McKissack, took over the business in 1968 and that was when she started knowing about how the business goes.

“We would go to work with him every Saturday starting at ten years old, walking construction sites, tracing documents, you know, learning about building systems early in life. It was all ingrained in us,” McKissack Daniel told CBS News.

After her father suffered from a stroke in 1982, her mother, Leatrice B. McKissack, stepped in and managed to grow the business even more despite having no training in architecture. Some of the remarkable projects under her helm is the $50 million complex at Howard University and a building at the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis.

In 2000, McKissack Daniel, who earned a Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in Civil Engineering from Howard University, took over the business and moved the headquarters from Nashville to New York. 

She credits her diverse employees for the company’s success. 

“People do business with people who look like them. All the work that we’ve done outside of New York, it didn’t matter in New York,” she said Which is why 61% of her employees are minorities and 34% are women. 

McKissack Daniel hopes her story will inspire other women of color “that the construction industry can build wealth” and look like #BlackGirlMagic.  

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