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In 1953 racial minorities had just taken their first few big steps toward equality. It had been only 6 years since Jackie Robinson had broken the color line in baseball, and 5 years since Harry Truman had desegregated the armed forces. But progress was halting. The U.S. Supreme Court's decision outlawing segregation in schools was still a year in the future. Few minority brokers could get standard contracts from carriers; they had to place their clients in the high-priced substandard market.

That didn't deter Ernesta G. Procope, who set up a storefront insurance agency called E.G. Bowman Co. in Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood that year. Her late husband, Albin Bowman, a successful real-estate broker, had convinced her to get her broker's license so she could learn the business and also insure his properties. She saw opportunity where no one else did. Bedford-Stuyvesant was full of beautiful owner-occupied brownstones, but hardly anyone wanted insure them. Her firm would fill that void. In 1953, she also married a rising young advertising executive, John Procope. If anyone had suggested back then that this startup agency would grow to become the nation's largest minority- and woman-owned insurance brokerage, serving some of America's biggest corporations and institutions, it would have seemed as outlandish as the idea that men would walk on the moon. Ernesta Procope's story is one of a remarkable perseverance that mirrors the changes in American life and the insurance industry for minorities over the past 56 years. The secret of her success is as simple as it is hard to duplicate: “I don't give up,” she said. The daughter of Caribbean immigrants, she was the only female in her family, and having to stick up for herself among her brothers made her tougher, she said. Music was her first love, and she became a piano prodigy who debuted at Carnegie Hall at age 13. But that didn't guarantee her a living, so she went into business.