Mayor Andre Dickens interviewed by Professor Paul Kohl

City of Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens, an alumnus of Georgia Tech’s School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering (BS ChBE 1998), addressed the school community on September 21 as the distinguished speaker in the annual Phillips 66 C.J. “Pete” Silas Lecture in Ethics and Leadership.

Dickens, who became the 61st mayor of Atlanta in January 2022, recalled meeting Andrew Young, a former city mayor, at age 12 at the grocery store at his mother’s insistence. By age 16, he’d decided he wanted to be mayor also.

“As I started to watch him more and more on TV now that I had met him, I said 'I want to be him,'” Dickens said. “I want to serve the City of Atlanta.”

One of the first people he told of his dream was another former Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin, whose son he played basketball with as a teenager. At the time, she served as chief administrative officer in Young’s administration, and she proved to be an important mentor, helping Dickens with his campaigns for Atlanta City Council. He cited her focus on ethics in reforming Atlanta city government after scandals in a previous administration as an inspiration to him as a leader.

Growing up in Adamsville, a working class neighborhood on the west side of Atlanta, Dickens said he’d never seriously considered going to college until halfway through high school. “I wanted to play baseball….Nobody in my family had gone to college; most of the people in my neighborhood had never gone to college,” Dickens said.

But then a school counselor encouraged him to apply to Georgia Tech’s Minorities Interested in Technology and Engineering (MITE) program during the summer before his senior year. “I came here for a week, loved it, and did well. They handed me a college application on the last day and said 'You’re our kind of material,'” said Dickens, who handwrote his application in an hour while waiting for his mother to pick him up. “I didn’t apply to any other colleges.”

At Tech, he was involved with a host of leadership activities in student government, his fraternity, and student organizations. “I was really learning about constituent services and community outreach as a student,” Dickens said, noting that those experiences helped him eventually transition from careers in engineering and sales into public service.

One of his early career experiences was working as a sales engineer for DSM Engineering Plastics, where he became the youngest and first Black salesperson of the year in his second year on the job. “I knew my product and would sell to the strengths, but I was always honest about the challenges,” Dickens said, noting that a 360-degree review of his performance revealed that what his customers appreciated most about him was his honesty.

Later, he co-founded City Living Home Furnishings, which he ran from 2002 to 2011, where his reputation was equally important, he said, highlighting the importance of ethics (the lecture’s theme).

He said, “Ethics does not mean that you’re always perfect, but that your intentions and actions are getting closer and closer to being right,” he said.

He said that when running for office, “Imagine I'm on my TV saying, ‘Trust me,’ and all people would have to do is call the Atlanta Journal-Constitution or the radio station and say, ‘Your furniture was trash!’....You are your history to somebody. Who you are in all of these places has really got to be consistent.”

To spotlight the importance of ethics and leadership, Phillips 66 awarded a grant to the School of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering in 1995 to develop the Phillips 66/C.J. “Pete” Silas Program in Ethics and Leadership.

Named in recognition of the outstanding professional achievements of Georgia Tech chemical engineering alumnus C.J. “Pete” Silas, who retired from Phillips Petroleum as president and CEO in 1994, the program focuses on technical and business decisions that have ethical ramifications.

Learn more about Andre Dickens' professional background and legislative priorities here.