Growing up on the south side of Chicago in a poor, black, working-class neighborhood, Delon Hampton realized early on that any success he would achieve in life, he had to create on his own. Having earned a place at college, he decided to focus on civil engineering. After completing his graduate and PhD studies at Purdue University, Hampton entered a career that was not always welcoming to an African American--first as an academic and then, in 1973, as the founder of Delon Hampton & Associates (DHA), an engineering consulting firm based in Washington, DC. Over the last forty years, DHA has...