John W. Rogers Jr.

Since late December 2011, the basketball court in the main competition gym at the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools has been named after Rogers. Rogers graduated from and played basketball at Lab. His name was printed on the floor during Winter Break of the 2011-12 school year, and the court's new title will officially be adopted on February 8, 2012, in a ceremony corresponding with Lab's home game against conference rival Northridge Prep.

He was part of the inner circle of the Barack Obama presidential campaign. He is a long-time Obama associate who serves as the co-chair of Obama's Illinois finance committee and who has been a major fundraiser for Democratic Party candidates. He served along with Bill Daley, Pat Ryan, Penny Pritzker and Julianna Smoot on Barack Obama 2009 presidential inauguration committee. In June 2009, Rogers became chairman of the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools' board. John left the board in 2016.

On February 23, 2008, Rogers became the first African-American winner of a Woodrow Wilson Award from Princeton University for his service to the Princeton alumni community, the Chicago community, the African American community and the financial community. In 1994, Time featured him as one of its 50 leaders under 40. Rogers is co-chairman of Jesse Jackson's annual Wall Street Project minority conference, chairman of the Chicago Urban League, a member of four corporate boards and was a leading campaigner for Princeton basketball legend and United States Senator Bill Bradley's 2000 United States presidential campaign. Three of the boards he serves on are for Fortune 500 companies: Aon Corporation, Exelon Corporation and McDonald's. He is a trustee of the University of Chicago. He has served numerous civic, educational and arts organizations as a director or trustee, including the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition, and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. At Princeton, he was a trustee of the University from 1990 to 1994 and more recently has served as a member of the Association of Black Princeton Alumni (ABPA) and the Princeton Varsity Club board of directors, as well as the Alumni Schools Committee. In the early 1990s, Rogers served as a fundraising leader in Project Vote voter registration efforts led by former United States President Barack Obama. He has been an advocate for greater diversity in upper-level corporate positions.

On December 28, 2002, Rogers married Sharon Fairley who was also a divorcee. At the time of her 2002 wedding announcement in The New York Times, Fairley, who is also a Princeton alumna, was the Executive Director of Consumer Marketing and Trademark Development at Pharmacia. Currently, Fairley is the City of Chicago's new leader for the Independent Police Review Authority, which investigates police-involved shootings. Previously, she worked for Chicago's Office of the Inspector General as First Deputy Inspector General and General Counsel and as an Assistant United States Attorney in Chicago for eight years.

Rogers has been a regular contributor to Forbes for many years and online archives of his commentaries go back as far as 2001. He provides regular personal finance commentaries in a column that has recently been appearing under the title "The Patient Investor".

Three-on-three basketball has been a continuing part of his life. As of 2000, he had a team with the second and fourth all-time leading scorers at Princeton, Kit Mueller (class of 1991) and Robinson (1983) and the school's second leading three point shooter Sean Jackson (1992). Between 1996 and 2000 his team had won 12 of 17 tournaments that they had entered. He scored the game-winning basket of Chicago's three-on-three basketball tournament on a team with Arne Duncan, Robinson, and Kit Mueller. Rogers and Robinson were among those invited to practice with Michael Jordan as he prepared for his comeback. He claims to be the first person to have beaten Jordan in a game of one-on-one at one of his fantasy basketball camps. Among the witnesses to the victory, which was reported in Sports Illustrated, were John Thompson Jr., Mike Krzyzewski and fellow fantasy participant Damon Wayans. He has Yoruba Nigerian, Cherokee and Scottish ancestries through his maternal ancestor, Scipio Vaughan.

Rogers was appointed as the Board President of the Chicago Park District for six years in the 1990s. He has also was appointed as board member to several companies, as a leader of several organizations affiliated with his collegiate alma mater, and as a leader in youth education in his native Chicago. In 2007, Rogers was honored with the Woodrow Wilson Award from Princeton University for the breadth and depth of his service to many organizations. While a student at Princeton, he was captain of the 1979–80 Ivy League co-champion Princeton Tigers men's basketball team.

The growth of his company has been steady. He founded the firm in July 1983 with $10,000, which he turned into $23,170 by the end of February 1984. He had financial backing from his mother and other friends and relatives. The Ariel fund became public on November 6, 1986. In November 2000, he had 41 employees. In February 2002, the company had 51 employees and more than 120 institutional clients (including United Airlines, ChevronTexaco, and the California State Teachers' Retirement System), which grew to include institutional clients such as Wal-Mart and PepsiCo by April 2005. The company has over 100 employees as of 2008. In 2008, the company changed its name to Ariel Investments, LLC.

Rogers studied economics at Princeton. After graduating in 1980, he worked for William Blair & Company in Chicago. A few years later, and with the financial backing of family and friends, he opened his own firm, starting with the Municipal Employees' Annuity & Benefit Fund of Chicago as his first account.

Rogers was one of the hot stock pickers of the 1980s. Rogers uses a value investing strategy, which has been a problem at times when growth stocks have been the better-performing investment class. However, his firm and its mutual funds have often been among the industry performance leaders and have on average outperformed the market. He eschews investing in new companies or making investments in companies that have no track record. For example, rather than invest in stocks of companies conducting research and development for potential AIDS cures, he would prefer to invest in hospitals that treat AIDS victims. His typical holding period is four or five years rather than the 14-month period of the average mutual fund. Mellody Hobson serves as the president of the company.

He was a college basketball teammate of Craig Robinson, and he served as captain of the 1979–80 Ivy League co-champion Princeton Tigers men's basketball team. He had a habit of perusing business journals and calling his broker from stadium payphones. Rogers credits Pete Carril, his basketball coach, as his greatest college influence because Carril stressed precision and teamwork.

Rogers was raised in the Hyde Park community area of Chicago's South Side, and graduated from the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools in 1976. At the age of 12 his father started giving him dividend-paying stocks. He went to college at Princeton University, where he used his free time to glean market information at his local stock brokerage and where he was influenced by Burton Malkiel's A Random Walk Down Wall Street.

John Washington Rogers Jr. (born March 31, 1958) is an investor, philanthropist and founder of Ariel Capital Management (now Ariel Investments, LLC), founded in 1983. He is chairman and CEO of the company, which is the United States' largest minority-run mutual fund firm. He has been a regular contributor to Forbes magazine for most of the last decade. Active in the 2008 Barack Obama presidential campaign, Rogers was a leader of the 2009 inauguration committee.

He is the only son of Jewel Lafontant and John Rogers Sr. His mother Jewel was the first African American woman to graduate from the University of Chicago Law School in 1946. She became a prominent Republican lawyer, and she nominated Richard Nixon, who won the Republican Party Presidential Nomination, at the 1960 Republican National Convention. His father was a Tuskegee airman pilot with over 100 combat missions of service during World War II and an eventual Cook County judge for twenty years. His parents divorced in 1961 and his mother died in 1997. Rogers was three years old when his parents divorced. He has a daughter, Victoria, with his former wife Desirée Rogers.