Finding a Way to College

Eventually, frustrated and unhappy in Atlanta, I got on a Greyhound bus and returned to New York. I did not have a real plan. I did not know exactly where I would live. I simply left.

Soon afterward, federal prosecutions swept through parts of my extended family and the world in which I had grown up. People I knew were arrested. Some would receive extraordinarily long prison sentences. The experience shook me deeply.

For a period, I felt unsafe. I moved around constantly. There were times when I slept on trains and times when I stayed wherever someone would allow me to stay.

Eventually, my mother obtained an apartment near Mosholu Parkway, and I was able to stay with her while finishing high school.

I finished.

I had already failed an entire year of high school. I had been arrested. I had experienced homelessness and housing instability. I had moved through foster care and group homes. I had experienced hunger. I had nearly taken my own life.

And I graduated six months early.

The problem was that I still had almost no idea what came next.

The Future I Couldn't See

For most of my adolescence, people laughed at the things I said I wanted to do. Music. Football. Big dreams. Eventually, if enough people treat your ambitions as jokes, you can begin treating them as jokes yourself.

I stopped imagining much of a future. I did not expect to live a particularly long life. I increasingly identified myself simply as someone from the hood, because that seemed to be the future everyone around me understood.

Then someone asked me a simple question: "Are you going to college?"

I said no.

The response was essentially: "Well, we're going to get you into college."

I said okay.

The Road to College

The idea was to help me attend an HBCU. Like many young Black people of my generation, much of what I knew about historically Black colleges came from A Different World. Based on that show, college looked pretty good.

People had somewhere to sleep. They ate regularly.

At that point in my life, those two benefits alone constituted a fairly persuasive recruitment strategy.

I was encouraged to retake the SAT and was given an SAT preparation book. So I studied. I obtained a fee waiver for the examination and raised my score substantially.

Years later, after studying higher education and eventually earning a Ph.D. in the field, I came to understand something that the young man taking that test did not: my academic profile, test performance, and life circumstances potentially made me competitive for educational opportunities far beyond what I understood at the time.

I simply did not know. And no one had taught me how the system worked.

Eventually, I was encouraged to attend a historically Black university with the understanding that substantial financial support, housing, and meals would be available to me.

For a homeless and frequently hungry teenager, that promise meant everything.

I went.

The reality I encountered was different from what I believed had been promised. I ultimately left my first year of college carrying significant debt and experiencing severe depression.

It would have been easy for that to be the end of my educational story.

It wasn't.