Clarence James Duvall Jr.

The Rev. C.J. Duvall remembers his mother telling him and his siblings that there was nothing in the whole wide world she wanted more than for them to be good citizens. It planted a seed within him.

“Later on, when … I strayed and made some mistakes [and] wasn’t a decent citizen, that echoed in my brain. And even to this day, I ask myself, ‘Am I being a good citizen? What does it mean to be a good citizen?’

“To be a good citizen means many things for many people, but for me, being a good citizen means contributing … to your community.”

Wherever that community happened to be at the time has been an integral part of the life of Duvall, one-time executive vice president of human resources for Alltel Corp. He still serves as a mentor to college students, an unofficial role he has filled since 2008.

Duvall’s goal since the early 1990s was to build up as many volunteer hours as possible. He recently checked — he keeps a chart — and found he’d served “only” 22,000 volunteer hours since 1993, an average of 18 hours a week. “I’m trying to get to 30,000,” he says.

“I don’t know if I’ll get 30,000 volunteer hours in before I’m 60. I don’t think it’s humanly possible. I don’t know if that’s even important.” Right now, he thinks the most important thing is teaching his daughters to be good citizens, as he was taught. ‘‘I think the most effective influence of giving is time.”

Duvall has spent the better part of his life filling roles that have made him a leader and a servant.

“I started this dual track serving church and community [and] working in the corporate world. And for me, it was pretty complementary, because that’s what I saw my dad [do] as I grew up — serving, volunteering in church and community, working to make a living for his family. I didn’t see it as a vocation; I saw it as a service.”

Duvall is seeking volunteer opportunities after having recently left his recent job as vice president for educational development at Philander Smith College. Meanwhile, he continues to serve on the Authority board of the Little Rock Technology Park taking shape in downtown Little Rock, a project about which he is excited.

With the park, Duvall says, “we have an opportunity to create a space to retain Arkansas talent as well as draw talent from around the globe to generate [a] new and different work demography.

“If the Technology Park can fulfill its vision, the atmosphere for innovation and start-ups may attract a new generation of innovators and entrepreneurs that could lure private investment to help create new jobs as well as handsomely reward investors. Both would be good for Arkansas.”

Duvall is also known for what could be called “mentoring through gardening,” first, through a community garden at 12th and Oak streets in midtown. This is where Duvall placed interns from Philander and the University of Arkansas at Little Rock as part of a summer gardening program. The garden was at Gerald’s House, a facility Duvall renovated when he pastored at Theressa Hoover Memorial United Methodist Church and which was used by students. These days, Duvall continues the gardening program at a community garden at 17th and Commerce streets near downtown.

“He cares about his family and cares about the students, and he [gives up] a lot to be with both,” says Joseph Bradley, a 2015 Philander Smith graduate from Chicago who’s now studying for a master’s in forensic science at the University of Albany.

Duvall paid for his diploma.

“I know several students that he personally helped out. … It’s hard not to like him.”

On the move

Duvall, 57, was the fourth of six children — three sons and three daughters — born in Missouri to Jo-Ann Duvall and Clarence J. Duvall Sr. of St. Louis. At the time his family lived in Kinloch, one of the oldest all-black towns west of the Mississippi. His father moved the family around quite a bit to better his children’s educational opportunities. Duvall went on to graduate from Webster Groves High School.

“The moves, for me, just sort of represented what the rest of my life was going to look like,” Duvall says.

Much of his adult moves were for post-secondary education: He left St. Louis in the mid-1970s to earn an applied science certificate from Lincoln University in Jefferson City, Mo. He returned to the St. Louis area to study business and behavioral science at Missouri Baptist College (now Missouri Baptist University), where in 1981 he earned his bachelor’s in behavioral science and business. He left home again to study at Purdue University School of Science in Indiana, where in 1984 he earned a master’s in industrial organizational psychology.

After graduate school, he worked in several cities. Later, he interrupted his corporate career in Little Rock to return to Webster Groves, where he attended Eden Theological Seminary, and in 1993 earned a master’s degree in theological studies.

“That’s where I get a lot of my stories from — from all those moves,” Duvall says. “Each one of those moves sort of has some defining moments for me … something that even today I can use to guide me. One of the cautionary tales that I use for kids that I work with today is, I know that mobility can work two ways. Mobility can lead you to places and spaces that [help you grow], or they can lead you to places and spaces that hurt you … I ended up in places that I shouldn’t have been … and also ended up in places … that broadened my world.

“And that’s one of the reasons why I like to mentor, because one thing I do know is that if I can work with a young person and move them into a space they’ve never seen, the space itself takes care of their growth. I myself am just a tool.”

As a child, Duvall aspired to be an architect. But he was discouraged from following this path. “I can remember the disappointment I felt when … my teacher in Drafting I, later Drafting II, basically said to me, ‘You know, you’d be better off playing sports.’”

Duvall recognizes now the racism in that advice. He changed his aspirations, but still has a fascination for buildings.

It’s a fascination that plays out in his enthusiasm for the $5.3 million, nearly 16,000-square-foot campus center at Philander, which opened in August 2014 and for which he gave a gift of $1 million. It also plays out in Duvall’s hopes for the tech park.

“Renovating things, renewing things, is pretty important to me.”

Duvall’s career path took him into the worlds of time and motion study — a method of establishing employee productivity standards in factories — then human resources.

His first corporate job was in Litchfield, Conn. As a management consultant for the company, Duvall worked in a handful of cities for two years. Seeking a change, he applied to a company in St. Louis and one here, and “was on my third and final interview, and got an offer [in St. Louis], when software development company Systematics … offered me a job in a totally different field than what I was in.”

He was in plant engineering; Systematics invited him to take a human resources job. Feeling that Little Rock was where he was supposed to be, he accepted and Jan. 17, 1986, was his start date.

An Arkansas natural

Louise Miller was instrumental, Duvall says, in getting him to come to Arkansas. At the time, she was the senior vice president of human resources for Systematics. “He was a very good fit with that organization and enjoyed being there,” she says.

“He has just always been a … service-oriented individual,” she continues, and he was a major contributor to a friendly, people-first atmosphere.

“I thoroughly enjoyed working at Systematics,” Duvall says, but by 1990 he left to complete his master’s in theological studies. Summers, he consulted for Alltel Information Services, which had bought Systematics.

In 1994, Duvall returned to Little Rock and to full-time work at Alltel. “All my friends asked me, ‘Are you going to get a church?’ and I said, ‘No, I’m going to volunteer [at] churches. I’m going to work in the corporate life.’ Because that’s how I know how to be.”

Back in Little Rock, rooming in Miller’s attic and working for Alltel, Duvall met his wife, Karen. “I met her while I was shopping for a wedding gift for a good friend of mine,” he remembers. She worked at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock at the time, but moonlighted in the bridal registry department at Dillard’s.

Soon after the couple married, in 1995, Karen Duvall expressed a desire to move. The couple left Little Rock for upstate New York, where Duvall worked with another consulting firm. After a couple of years, they decided to move back — it was too cold.

The couple have two daughters, 17-year-old Laisha, a junior at Episcopal Collegiate School, and 14-year-old Alana, a freshman there.

“My intent was to allow my kids to grow up here in Little Rock, which, to me, relative to all the places I’ve ever lived, was an ideal place to have a family — and that includes my hometown,” Duvall says.

He rejoined Alltel, staying with the company until it was bought out by Verizon. From 2010-2012, Duvall worked with Allied Wireless in Little Rock.

Duvall may not have been looking for a church to pastor, but God had other plans.

After seminary, he worked as a volunteer with Hoover’s Safe Haven program. After his New York hiatus, he became a volunteer associate pastor. Around 2008, he became senior pastor and held that post until 2010. He now fills in as needed at Wesley Chapel United Methodist Church on Philander’s campus.

Ultimately he quit the college’s board to become vice president of institutional advancement there, in order to build the campus. He’s also served as volunteer faculty.

As part of the August investiture of the college’s current president, Roderick Smothers, Duvall announced the 1877 Infinity Scholarship Fund, whose contributions he promised to match in addition to his own initial pledge to the fund.

Lessons well learned

“I tell people about C.J. and it’s like they can’t believe that a person with so many resources can be so humble,” says Francennett Herrera of Chicago, a 2011 Philander graduate, former Miss Philander Smith College and former intern for Duvall. “Of all the resources that he has, he could be doing anything … [but] when you see him, you don’t see everything he has and he doesn’t act like it. He’s willing to help those that need it, and he has an eye for people who need it.”

Although he’s not at Philander Smith anymore, Duvall remains especially proud of the campus center.

“The campus center, to me, is probably a divine story and a unique story in the sense that I believe it got built because of an intergenerational cooperation.

“What gets me excited about what you can do in a community is, if you include all generations — younger generation, middle generation and the older generation — the byproduct of that is usually good because it’s been so inclusive.”

And this, he says, is how he feels about the Little Rock Technology Park, for which his board term is currently up for reappointment.

“The tech park is offering an opportunity for the entire community to create a space where intergenerational learning, innovation and knowledge can take place,” Duvall says. “The only area I hope we will pay attention to [is] being inclusive enough to invite people from rural areas in and to invite minorities in, so it’s not just intergenerational, but it’s cross-cultural.”