Cedar Rapids native works to empower Black women

After overcoming a teenage pregnancy, enduring years of domestic violence at the hands of her ex-husband and earning her college degree with three young children in tow, Cedar Rapids native Carletta Knox-Seymour wants other Black women to know that there are no circumstances that they can’t rise above.

“With all of those adversities that I have endured, I continued to strive,” said Knox-Seymour, 67, who recently moved to Milwaukee. “There’s nothing that has happened to me that I have not been able to share with someone else and been able to help them along their journey.”

Knox-Seymour has been counseling women in a one-on-one capacity for years, including working at Waypoint’s domestic violence shelter in Cedar Rapids. On Sept. 13, she turned her passion into a business, launching Dignity Power Skills Consulting and Training with a series of live virtual courses.

“I want to be able to help Black women to see and get ahold of their dignity,” Knox-Seymour said. “We have to make sure that women are getting what they need in order to endure this life and become the women that they are meant to be.”

The business was conceived while Knox-Seymour was in her last semesters at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

“I was looking at how a lot of the young Black women were carrying themselves,” she said. While riding the bus to class, she would hear women use negative words to describe themselves and each other. “And I thought, my God, we have to do better than this. As a race of people, we have to do better than this.”

Knox-Seymour’s classes teach women how disenfranchisement affects them in the community, including restricting voting rights, making it hard to rise out of poverty and receive an education, and adding obstacles to employment.

“We know that women of color achieve quite a bit. But the road that goes before that is filled with many obstacles. My role is to help them come up from that. Especially in areas of employment,” Knox-Seymour said.

While some programs focus on resume building and role-playing for job interviews, Knox-Seymour also works with women to achieve soft skills, such as building character and confidence and the need to respect themselves and others.

“What I live by and tell people is that the secret to successfully changing one’s life is by changing one’s inner voice,” Knox-Seymour said. “Because you listen to you, to what’s going on inside of you.”

One woman Knox-Seymour has helped is Debbie Lawrence, who met Knox-Seymour through her children more than a decade ago. Lawrence was a dual-degree, hardworking employee who was frustrated by her lack of upward career movement.

"Just facing the disparity that African-American women face in the workforce, I could never seem to get ahead," Lawrence said. "Carletta has given me the burst that I needed to stay focused on the task and not get discouraged."

Lawrence was able to retire from her full-time career counseling job in May and has started her own business teaching sign language. She is currently in Zambia on a humanitarian mission to teach sign language to deaf children.

"Sometimes you just need encouragement. She's been a motivator," Lawrence said. "I'm a woman of dignity who's now making a difference in young kids' lives."

Knox-Seymour moved to Milwaukee soon after graduating from Cedar Rapids Washington High School. She met her husband while working at Blue Cross Blue Shield. After many years of enduring physical and emotional abuse in her marriage in order to keep the family together, she left her husband and filed for divorce when her children were 5, 3 and 9 months old.

About a year later, while still battling in divorce and child custody court, she quit her job at Blue Cross Blue Shield so that she could attend school full-time at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, earning her bachelor’s degree in mass communication with a minor in African-American studies.

“I understood at that time that I needed to secure a future for me and my children,” Knox-Seymour said. “The reality was, if I went to another job, just another job, what good is that going to do me? So the rationale was, I needed to go and better myself by going back to school.”

She started to open up to friends about the physical abuse she had endured, and the emotional abuse that was still ongoing as she and her ex-husband shared custody of their kids. While she was worried about their safety when she left, a “tremendous network” of friends and family helped her while they were rebuilding their lives.

“Those are the kind of things that, not only for my own life but for my children’s lives, that you have to take a stand. And I’ve always been the kind of person who took a stand. If I see an injustice, I talk about it,” Knox-Seymour said.

Knox-Seymour and her kids moved back to Cedar Rapids in 1996. After briefly moving to Minnesota, she came back in 2007 after her mother had a stroke. Then the floods of 2008 happened, and Knox-Seymour needed to find a way to earn a living while still being able to care for her mother.

She started Carletta’s Sweet Things in 2009, selling her baked goods at Fareway, Hy-Vee and other grocery stores, gas stations and farmers markets. Soon after she started another business, Imperial Cleaning Services, a residential cleaning service.

In 2010, she was appointed to the City Planning Commission by former Mayor Ron Corbett and served on the board for six years. She also was a candidate for the Cedar Rapids City Council in 2013 and 2015. After becoming involved in the Cedar Rapids branch of the American Association of University Women, she was elected the group’s first Black woman president in 2015. In 2020, she became the first Black woman president of the entire Iowa AAUW chapter.

While Dignity Power Skills is starting with virtual classes, Knox-Seymour wants to one day open offices in Cedar Rapids and Milwaukee because she feels that in-person counseling has a much bigger impact. Her goal is to be able to hire other Black women who can continue her work of counseling and mentoring women.

“I’m looking at this as being a business that’s going to grow,” Knox-Seymour said. “I’m excited. It’s been a long time coming.”

Knox-Seymour said she taught her children to always “go above the fray,” to not let adversities drag them down but to let them build their character. It’s a lesson she also has shared over and over again with other women, and she has seen it empower them to change their lives.

“Rising up from all these things, this is what I give to other people. I’m very proud of what’s getting ready to unfold for many women in their lives, of what Dignity’s going to be doing for these women. Because I know what it’s like,” Knox-Seymour said.