The First Catalyst Award: Remembering Inez Y. Kaiser

Page is presenting the Catalyst Award for the first time this year, celebrating leaders whose work was foundational or ahead of its time and helped change the direction of the profession, often long before that was widely recognized. Inez Y. Kaiser is a fitting first honoree. In 1957 she opened a public relations firm in downtown Kansas City, Missouri, becoming the first African American woman to run her own firm serving national clients.

Getting to that office had not been simple. Several building owners refused to lease her the space. She kept looking until she found one who would.

Kaiser was born in Kansas City, Kansas, in 1918 and grew up during the Jim Crow era. She majored in home economics and taught the subject for many years. What drew her toward communications was writing — a newspaper column called "Fashion and Otherwise" that eventually ran in Black newspapers around the country. She had thought of journalism as a hobby, and by her own account didn't initially recognize how much of what she was doing was public relations. Her friend Howard Wood, editor and publisher of the St. Louis Argus, encouraged her to take it up full time. She left teaching to try.

Her first account at Inez Kaiser & Associates was the Jenkins Music Company. Before long, 7UP, Sterling Drug, Burger King, Southwestern Bell Telephone and Sears Roebuck had come on as clients too. She had opened her doors at a moment when national brands were starting to pay attention to the Black consumer and had little idea how to reach that audience credibly. Kaiser could, and the value of her counsel was evident to the companies that hired her.

She brought the same skills to work well beyond her client roster, taking an active role in the NAACP and helping carry messages during the civil rights movement, when how those messages were received mattered a great deal. She also never quite set aside the home economics background she had started with. Her cookbook, Soul Food Cookery, did much to bring Southern home cooking — and its name — to a wider audience.

Lincoln University in Jefferson City, Missouri awarded her an honorary Doctor of Law in recognition of her public relations achievements and her influence on home economics teaching in Missouri schools. She lived to 98, and passed away in 2016. More recently, she became the first Black woman whose story appears in a public relations history textbook.

Her nomination drew on research from the Museum of Public Relations, which has documented her career as part of its work preserving the stories of Black pioneers in the field.

"My mother didn't set out to be a pioneer — she just wasn't going to let anyone tell her no," said Rick Kaiser, on behalf of the family of Inez Y. Kaiser. "She'd be glad the profession she fought her way into is still willing to remember how hard that fight was. This one means a lot to our family."

Nearly seventy years on, her name is the first to be attached to this honor.

Inez Y. Kaiser will be recognized at the 2026 Page Annual Conference, September 27–29 in Atlanta.