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AAPRC Weekly: Ghana Wilson

Ghana Wilson
Chapterwide Director of Communications
March of Dimes Birth Defect Foundation, Greater New York Chapter
NYC


Ghana Wilson's life and career have taken her on an extraordinary journey, along a road both familiar––from journalism to public relations––and frightening––to death and back.

The New York native grew up on Long Island, a writer from the very beginning. She started off telling fantastic stories that her parents urged her to write down. The notebooks filled with short stories led to a major in journalism at Howard University where Wilson finished in 1986. After a brief stint as a researcher and reporter at Newsweek, she spent two years as an associate editor at New York City's Daily Challenge, the venerable African-American paper. One day, though, a call from PR executive Carl McCaskill of The Terrie Williams Agency peaked Wilson's interest and would bring her career in journalism to an end.

"[Carl] was pitching one of his clients," Wilson remembers. "I knew what PR was. I had taken some PR classes when I was in college, but I was like: you actually get paid to call me so I can write about your client? Somebody pays you to do that? He said 'yeah.' And I said: can I come interview for a job?"

Wilson interviewed at the renowned agency and, in 1989, was hired as an account executive. She got her feet wet working on the hit movie House Party, writing film production notes. Over the next year and a half, Wilson worked with clients such as Wesley Snipes, Eddie Murphy and Miles Davis, and on projects such as New Jack City, A Rage in Harlem and Nelson Mandela's spectacular
visit to New York City in 1990. "I think I learned what not to do more so than what to do, which is just as valuable," Wilson recalls. "By observing some of the successes as well as the mistakes that Terrie [Williams] made, I learned a lot."

Being a quick study would come in handy in the months that followed, when Wilson and McCaskill started their own firm, McCaskill Communications. Less than two years after stepping into the industry, Ghana Wilson had become a vice-president and partner in a publicity and marketing agency that quickly racked up an impressive client list. In addition to actor Wesley Snipes who followed McCaskill and Wilson from The Terrie Williams Agency, McCaskill Communications worked with The Source magazine; Shade magazine; producers George Jackson and Doug McHenry (New Jack City) and their production company, The Jackson-McHenry Company; the newly minted Bad Boy Records and the label's non-profit arm, Daddy's House; the then-named African Heritage Network; actors Joseph Phillips ("The Cosby Show") and Vanessa Williams ("Soul Food"); and musicians Jay Hoggard and Will Downing.

For Wilson it was an exhilarating and demanding learning experience. "I was trying to take on every account…I would say: 'oh, this person is a great actor. No one knows about them. Let's take that person on. And Carl would say: 'okay, they can't pay us and we have payroll to meet, we have rent to pay, so, no we can't take them on,'" Wilson says. "If it had been left up to me I would have had 500 pro-bono accounts and no money coming in. That was one of the things I had to learn."

To say Wilson was moving in the fast lane during her five years at McCaskill would be a vast understatement. In what would be her last year with the firm, she calculated that, because of a demanding travel schedule that had her racking up frequent flier miles between New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and Atlanta, she'd spent exactly 36 days in her apartment.

Then, in July of 1994, it all came to an end.

When Wilson got a severe stomachache while on the beach for the Fourth of July weekend, she chalked it up to a combination of too much sun and potato salad. She went home and began to feel progressively worse. The next day she went to the emergency room where she was told there was nothing wrong, to go home and rest and drink some Pepto-Bismol.

Three days later Wilson was rushed to the hospital by ambulance. Three weeks later, after stints in some of New York City's most respected hospitals (NYU Dowtown/Beekman Hospital, New York Methodist Hospital), doctors told a stunned Wilson and her parents that they didn't know why, but that she was dying. They told her to go home and get her affairs in order. Wilson was 30 years old.

"My family has a bed and breakfast up in the Catskills, so I said good-bye to everybody and went upstate," Wilson recalls. "I sat there everyday wondering: is it going to be today?"

While Wilson waited for death, her mother frantically searched for a way to keep her alive. Wilson watched as her mother poured over books on natural remedies and ventured out into the garden and to health food stores for herbal concoctions she hoped would save her daughter. Finally, they decided to try another hospital, a small facility in the Catskills with only six or seven beds and one doctor. There, in the small rural clinic––after nurses removed her mother's poultices (garlic and peppercorns that day)––emergency surgery revealed the cause of Wilson's illness: her appendix had ruptured, probably that day on the beach.

The toxins from the ruptured organ were poisoning her entire system. Wilson had peritonitis, a condition, the doctors pointed out, that's usually a cause of death. Following her emergency operation, Wilson's ravaged body slipped into a coma for ten days. Later, her doctor explained that there was no medical explanation for why she was still alive––except one. "He said to me: 'if your mother's not a witch doctor, she should be,'" Wilson remembers. "He told me: 'Whatever she was doing was keeping you alive.' My mother was an unbelievable woman…way, way ahead of her time."

Sadly, Wilson's mother passed away in 1995, a year after helping her daughter fight for her life.

Wilson's brush with death left her in delicate physical condition. She weighed only 89 pounds when she got out of the hospital. "I said, well, I'm here so I'm supposed to be here and I'm supposed to be doing something," Wilson remembers. "I'm not sure what it is, but hopefully God will steer me in the path and show me what it is I'm supposed to be doing."

After spending a year recovering with relatives in South Carolina, Wilson returned to New York and went to work with a friend and former client at Shade magazine. She was doing strategic marketing for the magazine when someone mentioned an opening for a publicist at the March of Dimes. Wilson went in for the interview and got the job.

That was seven years ago. Today, she is the chapter-wide director of communications for the Greater New York chapter of the March of Dimes Birth Defects Foundation, overseeing all communications functions for the organization's work throughout New York City and Nassau, Suffolk, Westchester, Sullivan and Hudson Valley counties. She started out as a PR manager in 1996, and her very first project assured her that she'd landed in the right place.

In the mid-1990s, March of Dimes research showed that if a woman took just 400 mg of folic acid a day, the nutrient could help protect her unborn child from neural-tube defects (NTDs)––fatal defects of the brain and spinal cord that cause horrifying deformities and death. Wilson had just been hired when the organization launched a campaign to bring about public awareness of the connection between folic acid and NTDs. About six months into her tenure, Wilson took a phone call. A woman had seen a folic acid campaign poster on the subway. It so happened that the woman had a friend who'd lost a baby to a neural-tube defect, and the friend was pregnant once again. The woman urged her friend to take the March of Dimes' advice and take the folic acid. Months later, the women sent Wilson a picture of the healthy new baby.

"Something as simple as a subway ad that I did saved this woman from the heartache of having another baby that died," says Wilson. "Stuff like that, you see that and you know that there were people we reached and touched and lives were changed."

Does she miss her former life in entertainment PR? "I think non-profit is the only place that I could have gone. I feel like being here I'm actually doing something that makes a difference," Wilson insists. "I'm not just making sure that your album is number one with a bullet on Billboard––because in the final analysis, who does that help?"

Wilson, who is single, spends her downtime working on a memoir about her illness and playing auntie to a niece and two nephews. On weekends, she travels to the family bed and breakfast in the Catskills, where, ten years ago this summer, she waited to die. These days, though, she's happily waiting on guests.

AAPRC's Mission
The African-American Public Relations Collective (AAPRC) is an assemblage of professionals who provide communication conduits among clients, journalists, media and our communities. We come together as a collective because we recognize the importance of building those same conduits amongst ourselves.

A great deal of what we do is professional development––updating our skills, keeping pace with technology, refining and streamlining processes, providing a forum to tackle the issues that impact our work environment––but we believe our professional lives benefit most from the forging of effective alliances. Connected to one another, we possess the power of a nationwide body of committed, knowledgeable practitioners with an eye on the future.

As we move into the 21st century at lightning speed, mass media and its potent messages occupy an ever-larger part of our daily lives and our collective psyche. The AAPRC is focused on helping our members gain a deeper understanding of media's force and supporting their growth as powerful participants in the global communications network.

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