Cynthia “Cynt” Marshall has a crisp Cal cheerleader’s uniform hanging above her office desk.
Her ringtone is “Fight for California.”
On game days, she gets decked out in blue and gold, as she has ever since she became one of the first Black cheerleaders in Cal’s history.
Asked about her readily apparent school spirit, Cynt—until recently the CEO of the Dallas Mavericks basketball franchise and still an adviser to the team—says unabashedly, “I’m a cheerleader wherever I go. That is it. People know me for that. That is just in my bones. I just believe in lifting up the spirit.” At the same time, she says, “I’m not naive. I know when bad stuff is going on. I confront bad stuff. But I confront it with a spirit of optimism.”
Unrelenting, dogged optimism is the throughline of Cynt’s new autobiography, You’ve Been Chosen, which tracks Marshall’s trajectory from cheering on the Golden Bears in Memorial Stadium to becoming the first Black female CEO in the NBA. It also documents heartbreak and abuse and illness. It shows the sheer power of faith and positive thinking, while acknowledging that “[s]ometimes that proverbial light at the end of the tunnel is actually the headlight of an oncoming train headed right for you.”
Cynt prefers to begin her story in the Deep South—in Birmingham, Alabama, where she was born in 1959, in the violent days of Jim Crow.
“I always ask people if they’ve heard of the 16th Street Baptist Church, if they’ve heard of Bethel Baptist Church, [Reverend] Shuttlesworth. Those were my mom’s two churches. And it’s not lost on me that four little Black girls lost their lives in that bombing, four years after I was born.”
Like millions of other African Americans, her family joined the Great Migration. “I had an aunt who had moved to California, to the Bay Area. And my mom wanted to follow them because she just did not want her kids raised in the segregated South.… So they got on a train when I was three months old and moved to Richmond.”
The family settled in the Easter Hill Village housing project. Asked about those early years, Cynt says, “We had some things going on in our house, but I don’t have bad memories of growing up in Richmond. I describe myself as having a good childhood. I was exposed to activities. I got a chance to get involved in all kinds of stuff. If my mother wasn’t getting me involved, my teachers were getting me involved.”
That, again, is her relentless optimism talking. The autobiography lays out a different reality. Her mom worked two, sometimes three jobs to keep the family of six kids fed. Dad was a “hustler” given to frequent violent outbursts who once shot a man in the head in front of Cynt, in self-defense. In a family melee, her father, in one of his many attempts to convince his wife not to leave him, broke Cynt’s nose. While some children might have become bitter and traumatized, Cynt was wired differently. She says her father, and her fear of him, taught her resilience. Throughout the book, she downplays the abuse and elevates her mother, who bore the brunt of it, as her shining light.
“Every time I think about [my first day on campus]—and I talk about it often—I can just cry.”
Young Cynthia Smith, who was deemed a “mentally gifted minor,” took refuge in church and school, where she buttressed that resilience, and excelled, eventually becoming senior class president at John F. Kennedy High School.
Donna Houser ’82, now senior director of facilities and hospitality at the Cal Alumni Association, remembers Cynt fondly from those days. The two became friends through their time in student government; Houser was class vice president. “Cynt was just very focused, very energetic.… I think people tend to listen when she’s speaking, because she always has really thoughtful things to say. From across the room, you could point her out as the one with the big smile, and making everyone feel comfortable.” What the average person wouldn’t be able to see, though, is “how sensitive of a person she is, and how caring she is, and you know, a hard worker. She really focuses and gets things done.”
Cynt had options when it came to higher education but chose Berkeley because it was the “number one institution in the world and still close to home.”
“Every time I think about [my first day on campus]—and I talk about it often—I can just cry,” she says, recalling standing in Sproul Plaza, looking up at the Campanile. “It was July 11th. I remember getting baptized on July the 10th, the day before I started Summer Bridge. And then I ended up waking up late that morning. I was screaming. I was like, ‘Oh, my goodness.’ But I got to campus on time, and I looked up and saw those big buildings and I thought, ‘I gotta be big now.’”
Yvonne Vallier ’81 has been Cynt’s best friend since those days on Sproul. When asked if she remembers meeting Cynt on campus, a wide smile splays across her face. “We just immediately hit it off.” Back in the ’70s, she says, “when we were at Cal, I think at that time, it was like 30,000 students and … only about 300 Blacks on campus. And Cynt had this huge Afro.”
She remembers her friend’s enormous generosity. “Cynt had a brand-new Chevy Chevette.… [S]ome of us—the ones that like to hang out and party and find out what’s going on around town—we didn’t have transportation.… In order to use her car, we had to make a promise to her, and that was to go to church on Sundays. And she would be the one that’d be in the library studying.… She was always the one that got the job done.… Everything that Cynt set off to do, she accomplished. Everything, everything.”
On the personal front, Cynt married Kenny Marshall, a longtime admirer who, at Cynt’s insistence, waited to date until after she graduated from Berkeley. Yvonne was a bridesmaid in their wedding. Cynt and Kenny wanted children. When their firstborn child, Karolyn, died at just a few months old, it nearly crushed them. But their refusal to give up on parenthood led the Marshalls to adopt. Today Cynt and Kenny have four grown children, all adopted: Shirley, Alicia, and biological brothers, Anthony and Rickey.
On the professional front, Cynt was hired at Pacific Telephone and Telegraph (now Pacific Bell) in 1981, where she quickly climbed the ranks through a variety of senior positions, and stayed on with the telecom group as it was acquired by new parent company AT&T, ultimately being promoted to president of AT&T North Carolina.
Even if you’re across the room, you’ll know you’re in a room with Marshall, because she just brings everybody in. She’s inclusive of everybody. You’re drawn to her by her positivity and her spirit.”
With their extended family still on the West Coast, the Marshalls assumed they’d have to build community largely from scratch, but at a fundraising luncheon in Raleigh, she bumped into Yvonne and the two old friends screamed in delight. They fell right back into lockstep.
Just as Cynt was getting her sea legs in her high-profile position, she was diagnosed with Stage III colon cancer. The indomitable Marshall leaned into her faith yet again—and also on her mother, who, to her surprise, pushed pity aside and focused instead on purpose. She told her daughter she’d been chosen, a view Cynt also came to embrace. As she writes in her book, “The question I needed to ask when I got cancer wasn’t why. That wouldn’t get me anywhere. That’s not my business. The questions I needed to ask were: What will I do with what I have been given? How will I respond with grace? How will I respond with generosity? Where will this new path take me if I keep moving along it? And what can I take from this experience and offer back to the world as something good?”
Yvonne was part of the team that supported Cynt through her chemo—a card-carrying member of what Cynt calls her posse. Marshall refused to quit her job and worked as much as possible in the office. Treatment days were Cynt’s opportunity to change the culture of the hospital facility, transforming infusion sessions into themed celebrations, tailgating in hospital chairs. Cynt got to know the people giving and receiving care near her and inducted them into what she called Chemo Clubhouse, adding inclusivity and culture to an otherwise soul-scorching experience.
Cynt took these lessons from the Clubhouse with her when she returned, cancer-free, to her post at AT&T. She made history as the first African American woman to chair the North Carolina Chamber of Commerce. When she retired from the company, her title was senior vice president of human resources and chief diversity officer.
“I worked for AT&T for 36 years. The last two years of my career had a DEI component in my title. I worked all of our business: technical, non-technical, staff, line, California, North Carolina, Texas, right? My last job in the company ended up being senior vice president of human resources for four years. But the last two years of that they added the DEI piece because one of my buddies was the SVP of diversity and inclusion, and she left to go take another job. They did not replace her. They just put her job on top of my job. But let me tell you why that worked. Because if you’re doing this right as an organization, as a corporation, whatever, it should be in your DNA.”
That ethic and Cynt’s demonstrated excellence caught the attention of Dallas Mavericks’ owner Mark Cuban, who tapped Cynt to help the franchise recover after allegations of longstanding sexual misconduct by team leadership rocked the sports world.
Cynt arrived in 2018 with both open ears and a plan for a total organizational overhaul.
“The first thing I focused on was a set of values: character, respect, authenticity, fairness, teamwork, and safety, both physical and emotional”—CRAFTS. “And so I said, ‘Here’s what we’re about. And these values will not just hang on the walls, but they will operate in the halls. Everyone we hire, every decision we make will be based on this set of values.’” She wrote up a 100-day plan over a weekend, just based on discussions she’d had with Mavs employees and Cuban. “And we just laid it out, then went and had the press conference that is kind of famous now.”
Erin Finegold White, senior vice president of corporate communications and events and experiences for the Mavericks, worked closely with Cynt as her right hand through her tenure in Dallas. Now in her eleventh season with the team, Erin’s memory is long enough to remember the days before Marshall’s arrival.
“There were a couple of people in leadership before Cynt came that, I don’t want to say set the culture, but benefited from the culture.… They were benefiting from being men at the top … [T]hose were the people that were like, ‘Oh, this is probably a PR stunt, and she’ll be gone in 90 days.’”
Instead, Cynt ended up staying for six years. “I think she could have stayed another ten years, and it would have been great. But she did accomplish what she set out to do, which was to transform the culture.… She will have a legacy forever.… We should raise a banner for her in the American Airlines Center, because she did so much for the organization.”
Cynt echoes that pride in what she’s accomplished with the Mavs, even as she transitions to running her own consulting business, Marshalling Resources, which still advises the team. “We’re looking at a renovation of our arena or building a new arena in Dallas. I get involved with the city and all that. And I’m advising them right now on how to really engage with the community [and] keep the morale up high right now because, you know, we’re going through something. We traded our star player.”
Ah, yes, Luka. For the unfamiliar, Luka Dončić is arguably the future of basketball. His late-winter trade to Los Angeles was an unthinkable shock to many. Cynt was undoubtedly among the surprised, but sees her journey with the team as inextricably tied to the Slovenian superstar’s. They arrived in the same season, and his final game with the team aligned with Cynt’s last day in her full-time capacity.
“My last game was Christmas Day, and Luka came up to me and said he’s going to miss me and all that. Little did we know it was going to be his last day too.”
Finegold was in attendance for this season’s April 9th game—the night Luka returned to Dallas as a Laker. She recalls the point guard pausing after the game to interact with Marshall. “I know he probably wanted to exit, but he stayed and chatted with her for a little while … and gave her a hug and it was just, it was really nice. It was really sweet.”
Of her former colleague, Finegold says, “She is this beacon of hope and light and inspiration, and you can definitely hear her a mile away with that infectious laugh. When you’re talking to her, you’re the only person in the room, and you matter.… And so she’s magnetic.… Even if you’re across the room, you’ll know you’re in a room with Marshall, because she just brings everybody in. She’s inclusive of everybody. You’re drawn to her by her positivity and her spirit.”
So, what is on the horizon for this woman who has built her career around the notion that everyone belongs and that diversity, equity, and inclusion are keys to success?
“Since I started my company, Marshalling Resources, I advise my clients to lead with inclusion, because at the end of the day, it’s about including everybody. Where I am on the whole DEI thing is I’m hoping it gets us … back to the basics, back to looking at our policies and practices and making sure they are fair and they foster equality.… And if somebody came to me right now and showed me where all of these companies and organizations that are pulling back on DEI had fair policies and everybody had access to opportunities, [then] I have no problem with them getting rid of a program. But in the event that fairness and equality and engagement is not happening, who’s going to hold the companies accountable? We’re risking history repeating itself.”
But, as always, she remains positive about the future.
“I am very optimistic about the outcome, okay? I believe in the true definition of faith, just like the Bible says: It’s ‘the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.’ I just truly believe. I have faith in things that I can’t even see, like I have faith in humanity right now. And sometimes we don’t get to see that on a daily basis right now—well, not the full exercise of it. And still, I have faith that certain things exist. Even the things I cannot see.”
Chinaka Hodge is a poet and screenwriter, originally from Oakland. A Berkeley High School alum, Hodge served as executive producer on the forthcoming Marvel TV series IRONHEART.
