Open Writing

For the stereotypical, poor, African American male born into a big city in the USA, life is unfortunately too often prescribed. Place of birth: a municipal, low-income housing project ghetto, or a homeless shelter. Mother: dangerously young, under-educated and with no regular income. Father: absent, either in jail, unknown or fled. Role models: drug dealers, pimps and gangsters. Life expectations: addiction, imprisonment, AIDS, violent death. Opportunities for advancement: become a drug dealer, basketball player, a rapper or a pimp.

It is encouraging to know that there are miraculous exceptions to this pattern. A turn of fate, an accidental encounter; or that rare phenomenon, a mentor, intervene to break the iron chains of circumstance. The question often asked is why these exceptions are so few? In order to understand the answer, it is necessary to understand what it is like to be born into a world of poverty, without good, strong role models.

Harvard Professor, Luis Gates, himself an African American from a poor family, recently interviewed on TV an African American man serving a jail sentence. The man made a very telling statement: that growing up, the only good, male role models he might have had were policemen and firemen, but none of them lived where he did. So his opportunities to be influenced by them on a daily basis were zero.

In Garry’s (not his real name) case, he was very fortunate to have his mother as the strong influence in his life. He was born in Harlem, at the northern end of Manhattan. In the twenties and thirties a bastion of middle class black respectability, art and music, the district subsequently degenerated into a black ghetto. By the time Garry was born, the population was 75%, predominantly poor, African American.

His formal education began in an old and dilapidated city school. Classes were overcrowded and the teachers were young and inexperienced, so it came down to learning by rote with no opportunities for creativity. He remained there until his fourteenth year, when he won a scholarship offered by the Boy’s Club of America to go to the exclusive and elite, Avon Old Farms Boarding School in Avon, Connecticut.

While this could be perceived as his great good fortune, in reality he found himself in another world that he was totally unprepared for. He was one of only four African Americans in a student body of 200, very wealthy Caucasians. He did well academically in the year that he spent there, but not surprisingly, he never felt comfortable and decided to return to a municipal school.

Fortunately, his mother had decided by this time that Harlem was no place to raise a young boy, and had moved to Englewood on the New Jersey side of the Hudson River. This move was not without sacrifice for her, since it meant leaving behind her support group, and having to take on additional jobs to cover their increased living costs. The High School he attended in Englewood was an improvement over the Harlem school, but not an institution that encouraged high aspirations.

Notwithstanding, after graduation from High School, he was accepted into Fairleigh Dickenson University, from which he gained a Batchelor of Arts Degree, and attained the Dean’s List three times. He spent the next two years as a draftee in the U.S. Army, where he was commissioned as a Second Lieutenant. After completing his military service, he returned to his studies at Seton Hall University, School of Law, graduated with a Juris Doctor (J.D.) degree in 1982, and found work in the office of the Public Defender in Trenton, New Jersey.

Defending the indigent in the criminal courts was the beginning of a life of service for Garry. In 1988 he set up his own law office amid the urban blight of Elizabeth, New Jersey, to better service his poor clients and to conduct research. In 1995 he began lecturing on Criminal Law in New Jersey high schools, and reviewing criminal law curricula. As a result of his firm belief in the value of education as a means to break the cycle of poverty, in 1998 this remarkable man enrolled in the Masters program in Educational Supervision at Kean University, graduating in 2004.

The book on Garry is far from closed. In his own words, his objective is “To become the most competent, qualified and caring [school] administrator that I can be.” To further that end, he was recently accepted into the Doctor of Education in Educational Leadership program at Rowan University. He continues to serve in the U.S. Army Reserve with the rank of Lieutenant Colonel in the Judge Advocate General’s Corps. But of all his achievements, probably his most valuable and important function is as a role model for the young people whose fate still hangs in the balance.

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