Black History Month 2004 Local Heroes:
Sylester Flowers
Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Ramsell Corporation
A retail pharmacist by training, Sylester Flowers began his career as a pharmacy administrator at St. Luke's Hospital in 1951. With a desire to start his own business, he opened his first pharmacy in Oakland in the 1960s and has since operated a total of four pharmacies in the Bay Area, all in underserved communities. He has always felt a responsibility to be more than just a drug dispensary and so, with the onslaught of the AIDS epidemic 20 years ago, he began to work with community leaders to ensure that individuals on society's fringes were able to obtain the expensive drugs to combat the disease. Ten years ago, he founded the Ramsell Corporation, a holding company and third-party insurance entity, to ensure that AIDS medications were available on a wide scale through neighborhood pharmacies to help low-income individuals stay on their medication.
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