Corvette’s Cooksey wins civil rights award

Anyone who has ever met Will Cooksey, who retires in March as the General Manager of the General Motors Assembly Plant in Bowling Green, Kentucky – the home of the Corvette – will remember the occasion. It’s not just that Cooksey is naturally gregarious. It’s that he is a very, very big man. Not overweight. It’s just that he’s about 125% of life size. (That’s him, in the orange shirt, mingling with Corvette owners at the National Corvette Museum, located across the street from the Bowling Green plant.
 
As a plant manager, Cooksey introduced quality procedures to the assembly plant that have resulted in the C6 Corvette being one of the most taughtly and carefully assembled vehicles in the GM line up.
 
Outside of the plant, however, it seems Cooksey has been equally concerned with quality: the quality of life.
 
Last week, Cooksey received the “Civil Rights Humanitarian Award” in Bowling Green for his work outside of the plant. Cooksey Cooksey sits on the Greenview Hospital board of directors, the boards of the National Corvette Museum, Tennessee State University’s Foundation Board of Trustees, the Western Kentucky University College of Education and Behavioral Science, the Drug Abuse Resistance Education Advisory Council, and the Advancing Minorities’ Interest in Engineering Executive Advisory Board.
 
Cooksey related that when initially asked by General Motors to take the Bowling Green assignment, he was asked if he would be comfortable as a black plant manager of a plant where most of the employees were white. He said it wasn’t a problem. “I never worried about getting to know people. People are people regardless.”
 
Bigger than life, and not just in physical stature.