Progressive CEO in Trump era performs delicate dance
OKLAHOMA CITY — One of the most formative experiences of J. Clifford Hudson’s life happened about 20 minutes away from the glass-walled office he now occupies as chief executive of Sonic Drive-in, the burger-and-milkshake chain.
It happened in 1969, Hudson’s freshman year of high school and the first year of court-ordered desegregation for his school district.
“You had school board members really inciting hatred. You had parents showing up at public meetings screaming, ‘You better frisk those kids before they go to school with my daughter,’” Hudson, now 63, recounted in a recent interview. But his parents did not protest the desegregation or remove him from the school.
“My parents had become strong believers that our country had a real problem,” he said, “and that we needed to embrace it and confront it, not run from it.”
The experience, he said, “helped me with some sensitivity to the richness and breadth of our society, and that the more you limited yourself, as in the white males only chumming with white males, the more you cut yourself off from that richness.”
That lesson has helped shape Hudson’s worldview and his management approach at Sonic, which he has led for more than 20 years. During that time, he has cultivated something of a rarity in corporate America — a management team that is mostly women and minorities and a board that is close to that.
And in choosing to speak publicly about his personal views in recent months, Hudson has joined other corporate executives, normally as tight-lipped a bunch as can be found, who are commenting on social and political issues like never before. Many have forcefully denounced policy proposals from Washington or actions by President Donald Trump that they think threaten to harm society, the environment and their employees.
That Hudson would speak for diversity and inclusion is not surprising. He is a longtime Democratic donor whose office