Theseare the words of an 18-year-old who recently graduated from high school in ahigh-poverty neighborhood in the nation’s capital: “Where I live, which is Ward7, everyone is the same ... If you follow the crowd, you’re going to end updead or in jail because that’s where most of them are. But if you’re a leaderand you make your own decisions, then you can set your path for life.”
MikeRuff had to make up his mind a while back that he was going to step up andbecome one of the leaders. That’s what he told participants at the recentsymposium, “Black Male Teens: Moving to Success in the High School Years,”sponsored by the Educational Testing Service and the Children’s Defense Fund. Mikeexplained how he came to embrace standing out from the crowd by defying lowexpectations -- and how he reached a key turning point when a mentor told him he couldn’t succeed.
Collegeand career planning wasn’t a reality for the people he knew: “Ninety-fivepercent of the students are poor. We come from basically nothing, because ourparents were in the same situations that we are.” His father had dropped out ofschool in tenth grade, and when Mike started high school he seemed to beheading down a similar track: “Ninety percent of the school did the same thingI did -- skipped class, left school, and no one seemed to try to find out what theproblem was.” His grade point average freshman year was a 2.5, and at the timehis main ambition was to keep up a D average so he could graduate.
Butthen he met with Mr. Mungin, one of the adults he’d met through an enrichmentprogram he’d enrolled in during middle school, who asked Mike how his plans forlife after high school were coming. Mike told Mr. Mungin he’d started thinkingabout a career in hospitality management, and Mr. Mungin asked to see hisgrades: “So he looked at my transcript, just for that ninth grade year ...saw my grades, D, D, B, D, D, A, and looked back up at me with the straightestface and said, ‘You can’t do it.’ So that kind of hurt me, for a grown mantelling me that I can't do something. So then I just got up, walked out, and[caught] the bus home.”
Withsome uncaring and uninterested adults, that’s exactly where the story wouldend. Mike would have left discouraged from having a dream at all. But thatwasn’t Mike’s story: “By the time I arrived home, there is Mr. Mungin alreadythere. I was wondering, why is this man at my house after he told me that Ican’t do something?” Mike had been lucky enough to find a true mentor on amission. As Mr. Mungin talked to Mike and his mother that day he was able toshow Mike that of course he believed he couldsucceed, but he also knew the path Mike was on so far wasn’t going to get himthere. Mike took the message to heart. Other mentors stepped in along the wayto support him. By eleventh grade Mike had brought his GPA up to a 3.0, and bytwelfth grade, a 3.75.
NowMike is attending Tuskegee University, a historically Black university inAlabama founded by Booker T. Washington and the alma mater of the brilliant scientistGeorge Washington Carver and many other scholars and leaders, where he plans todouble major in hospitality management and psychology. Mike knows that in hisgraduating class he is one of the lucky ones: “We started off in this twelfthgrade with at least 300 students ... but only 130 twelfth graders graduated.”
Mr.Mungin helped Mike realize he needed to change, and every one of the otheryoung Black male leaders on the panel -- all college students and recent collegegraduates -- agreed on the importance of the mentors in their lives. But whathappens to the students who never know a Mr. Mungin? What will happen to theother students in Mike’s high school class who didn’t graduate at all or werecontent to get out with mostly Ds? Far too many young Black boys are onlyhearing the first part of the message -- “You can’t do it.” We need supports inplace to show them that they canchoose a different path -- and even if no one else they know has done it, they candecide to be the ones to step up and lead the way.