Walgreens’ vaccine rollout will be helmed by the only Black woman helming a Fortune 500 company

“After I gave him the side eye,” she recounted in a 2018 Spelman College commencement speech, pausing to reenact her expression to the graduates of the historically Black college for women in Atlanta, “I ascended to the podium as the keynote for the day, and I enjoyed the look on his face when my bio was read,” she said. “When you’re a Black woman, you get mistaken a lot. You get mistaken as someone who could actually not have that top job.”

Brewer is not likely to be mistaken now. On Tuesday, Walgreens Boots Alliance named Brewer to lead a retail pharmacy chain that has fallen behind rival CVS and now faces the massive challenge of rolling out coronavirus vaccines to end a pandemic that has disproportionately struck Black Americans.

The appointment will make Brewer, who has had the chief operating job at Starbucks, the only Black female CEO of a Fortune 500 company.

It’s a singular distinction both stunning for the year 2021 and yet all too familiar in corporate America, where it has been more than four years since a Black woman held a Fortune 500 CEO job and where there are currently just four Black male CEOs.

Brewer’s résumé — which has included top jobs at Starbucks, Walmart and Kimberly-Clark, and director seats on powerhouse boards like Lockheed Martin and Amazon — made many see her rise to the corner office as a question of when, not if. (Brewer is stepping off the Amazon board to join Walgreens; Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.) Known as an approachable, down-to-earth operator with a history of jobs overseeing large business units, she has been a perennial presence on Fortune’s Most Powerful Women lists and was viewed as a potential successor to Starbucks CEO Kevin Johnson.

Yet her appointment comes at a time when American business has been grappling with its role on racial equity, spending the last year promising to diversify its ranks amid the Black Lives Matter movement. That makes Brewer, who chairs the Spelman College board of trustees and helped Starbucks navigate a high-profile racial-bias incident in Philadelphia in 2018, uniquely positioned among CEOs to speak credibly about her experiences as a Black woman.

“Roz’s appointment is not only a solid business decision; it’s a huge opportunity for the Black community overall,” said Crystal Ashby, interim president of the Executive Leadership Council, a membership group of Black executives. “Having a Black woman sitting in the seat who is cognizant of the disparities — for her to be in a position to make decisions, to influence peers, to be engaged in conversations and dialogues — is very promising.”

Brewer, 58, a Detroit native who was the youngest of five children and whose parents worked for General Motors, has spoken openly about how the deaths of unarmed Black men George Floyd and Ahmaud Arbery have made her “nervous and scared” for all the young Black men in her life.

“This is a Black woman, a Detroiter, a Spelman grad and a mega company person who’s true to herself,” said Michael Hyter, the chief diversity officer of the executive search firm Korn Ferry. “I think there will be a legitimate perspective from her that is balanced around the needs of people less fortunate.”

Brewer has shared stories in an interview with the Stanford Graduate School of Business about telling colleagues the real reason she had to leave early from work: Her teenage daughter, a swimmer, had to spend hours having her hair braided before getting in the pool.

And she has recalled in stark terms the firestorm that erupted in 2015 on social media — Brewer has said she received death threats after she talked about demanding diversity on teams and suppliers in a CNN interview. “It was a nasty, nasty reminder that every day, people of color face systemic racism so blatant, so emboldened and yet so normalized,” Brewer said in her Spelman commencement speech.

Geri Thomas, a retired diversity chief of Bank of America who has worked with Brewer on programs at Spelman — she also attended a fundraiser at Brewer’s Atlanta home in 2018 for fellow Spelman grad Stacey Abrams when she ran for Georgia governor — said Brewer was deeply invested in mentoring young Black professionals, to the point that Brewer would encourage them to leave a company she worked for if the young women weren’t being valued.

“There’s just so much you should take — at some point you need to make the decision that’s in your best interest,” Thomas said.

She faces a major challenge at Walgreens: Analysts say the pharmacy retailer has underperformed during the pandemic, struggling with lower store traffic as consumers consolidated shopping trips and bought more low-margin consumer goods. Amazon is muscling into prescription refills, and Walgreens’ biggest rival, CVS, has turned itself into an integrated health-care company after acquiring pharmacy benefits manager Caremark and the insurer Aetna.

“From our perspective, the biggest challenge for Walgreens is really to define its place in the competitive health-care world,” said Mickey Chadha, an analyst at Moody’s, who said the investor reaction to Brewer’s appointment was largely positive.

(Walgreens first took a stake in Alliance Boots, a multinational pharmacy business, in 2012, and completed the merger in 2014. The company declined to make Brewer, who will not start the job until March 15, available for an interview; Starbucks also declined to make Brewer available.)

Meanwhile, the rollout of the vaccine presents an opportunity — analysts say it could lead to higher foot traffic and sales when consumers coming in for a vaccine stay and pick up other items. But it will also be a huge logistical challenge that involves navigating a maze of local government relationships, managing an army of workers on the pandemic’s front lines and earning the trust of consumers with a smooth vaccine rollout that is already mired in chaos and doubt.

Those who’ve worked with Brewer say she’s up for the task. “She’s someone who delivers results, someone who can build a team and someone who can lay out a vision of where they think they ought to go next,” said Thomas J. Falk, the former CEO of Kimberly-Clark, where Brewer started as a chemist and worked for 22 years. When they were both members of the Lockheed Martin board, Falk said, they would often walk Sam’s Club stores together in Dallas. “Just to see how people in the store interacted with her — it didn’t matter if you were someone running produce, she has a way that resonates with people.”

After joining Walmart in 2006, Brewer became the first woman and first Black executive to lead a major unit at the retail behemoth when she was named chief executive of its Sam’s Club division in 2012. She grew the warehouse unit’s stores but had to compete with larger and more upscale rival Costco. After five years, she left Sam’s Club, where she has said she had to fight for resources with the corporate parent. “I said I really want to just freely run a business unencumbered by having to deliver my best and brightest over to the other unit,” she said during a 2019 Economic Club of Chicago interview.

Soon after joining the board of Starbucks in 2017, she was asked to lead operations at the coffee giant. Within months, she found herself managing the fallout after the arrest of two Black men waiting at one of the coffee giant’s Philadelphia cafes.

“As a Black woman, as a mother of a 23-year-old Black male myself, a girl from Detroit who challenges racism every day because she’s never had a choice, and as a human being, it infuriates me to see acts of hate, acts of entitlement, acts of privilege repeating over and over and over and over and over again in this country” she said of the Philadelphia incident in her 2018 Spelman speech.

Brewer picked up on the viral story early on social media, and through message from her son, asking what she was going to do about it. Before long, she was flying to Philadelphia to meet with other executives to handle the crisis; Starbucks was ultimately applauded for shutting all its stores for anti-bias training. “Everyone who worked there knows it was her and her relational equity that helped the company navigate through that,” said Hyter.

Others who know Brewer say she could bring that same awareness to the Walgreens job. Kenzie Biggins, who interned with Brewer at Walmart and now runs a virtual executive assistant firm, Worxbee, said having a Black woman at the helm of one of the major companies distributing the vaccine could reassure Black consumers who may be wary about taking it.

“Roz has experienced these things as a Black woman,” said Biggins. “It’ll be key to how the vaccine rollout is going, to make sure there’s a voice in the room thinking about access for everyone.”