An Early Push in Right Direction--College : The Nonprofit 100 Black Men Service Organization Has Begun an Ambitious 4-Year Project That Is Providing Tutors, Mentors and Encouragement to 2,000 Ninth-Graders in 7 Local School Districts

Even among a rapt audience sitting motionless watching a movie premiere, Fred Calloway cannot relax and stop thinking about the 100 Black Men.

As the black teen-age protagonist in “Native Son,” the movie based on Richard Wright’s novel, leaves the rat-infested ghetto room he shares with his family in the 1930s and heads outside to his doom, Calloway turns and whispers:

“Many black kids are still living four, five, six in a room. That’s the kind of kids we need to interact with. We need to show them who we are and what we have achieved. And we need to put in place the vehicles for them to succeed.”

It is not unusual for Calloway, a mirror and lamp manufacturer and multiple property owner, to be thinking about the 100 Black Men of Los Angeles Inc. As president and a charter member of the group, which started in 1981, he said he spends 30% of each working day on the nonprofit organization’s activities.

That alone could keep him busy. The group, with a membership of 182 well-to-do black males including actor Sidney Poitier and ex-heavyweight boxing champion Ken Norton, started as a social organization but quickly got involved with the black community. In recent years, Calloway said, it has raised more than $90,000 in the fight against sickle-cell anemia and approximately $50,000 for the United Negro College Fund. It annually awards 25 scholarships of $1,000 each to black college students and distributes 500 turkeys to needy families at Christmas.

Now the group has started its most ambitious project: pledging $100,000 a year for the next four years to provide tutors, mentors and other encouragement for 2,000 promising black ninth-graders in the Los Angeles area. The program began last summer. (Another group will not be started until organizers see how the program works.)

Other black organizations have pledged additional funds to help youngsters from the Los Angeles, Compton, Inglewood, Lynwood, Pasadena, Pomona and Santa Monica school districts.

The 100 Black Men hope that the Young Black Scholars, chosen because they had B or better grade averages in the eighth grade, will emerge from high school in four years with grades high enough to enter the University of California system, helping to build leaders for the local black community.

Calloway said Young Black Scholars developed after a study by the California Post Secondary Commission showed that only 3.6% of the state’s 1983 black high school graduates qualified for the UC system. If it weren’t bad enough that only 838 out of 23,000 graduates were eligible, a third of those high school graduates finished with less than a C average, said Winston Doby, vice chancellor for student affairs at UCLA.

A conference convened by Doby’s office to study those dismal statistics recommended the formation of Young Black Scholars, and the 100 Black Men’s education committee, chaired by educator and investor Warren Valdry, stepped in to help get it going.

In a high-rise Westwood office building, Young Black Scholars administrator Judith Mayes and her staff scrutinize regular student progress reports.

After a Westchester High School student reported that his English grade was falling below C, Mayes called the boy’s parent and made this notation on a report the student had returned:

“Student is applying himself more because parents are demanding improvement. The parental demand is that he must improve his grades to continue to play football.”

As she studied reports, the telephone rang. A mother was seeking a tutor for her son who was practicing basketball during the afternoon when school tutors were available. Mayes’ assistant, Steven Berry, supplied names of two private tutors and invited the mother to call back for more if they didn’t work out.

While Mayes works to help students from her office, many strive to help themselves. On Friday afternoons while many of her classmates play or shop, Dava Taylor, 14, invites friends to her home to study French and algebra.

Late one recent day the students from John Burroughs Junior High School sat around Taylor’s thick, wood dining table, a basket of fruit and nuts in the center, quizzing each other on French vocabulary.

“So many intelligent black students get wasted because no one ever pushed them and told them they were great,” said Taylor, who wants to be a singer or an entertainment lawyer.

“In this program they tell you how interesting you are and the things you can have if you just hit the books. When I found out I was a member I was flattered because no one except Mom and Dad has ever told me how smart I was. It gives you people you can model yourselves after.”

Local educators seem equally enthusiastic.

“It’s absolutely a wonderful program,” said Mary Voiles, principal at Los Angeles’ John Muir Junior High School, where about 30 students are involved in the project. “It’s overdue. . . . It will take youngsters that have potential and provide academic support and assistance and ensure that they are ready to go to college. . . .”

Voiles called it “shocking” that only 3.6% of black high school graduates qualify for the UC system and noted that even fewer than that would attend.

“A lot of them have responsibilities to families,” she said. “If the youngster is the oldest boy, he knows that if he gets out of school he has to go to work to help his family. But through this program that kid is going to have his eyes opened and will have other options and get a break. . . . Parents will be exposed to other options for these children that have the talent to go to school.”

“I think it’s an excellent program,” said Minnie Floyd, principal at West Los Angeles’ Palms Junior High School where four students participate in the project.

“I’m thinking of students whose peers may not be achieving and whose friends may be working to buy fancy cars at jobs that don’t require as much education as these young people are capable of acquiring. It’s always very tempting to stop and make the quick dollar, although it may be wasting a mind.

“I also think it’s very difficult for students to compete for grades. It means burning the midnight oil and it’s very easy to give up and decide you’re going to go out with your friends to party.”

Helping young people realize their potential was one of Dr. William Hayling’s goals when he moved to Los Angeles and started 100 Black Men.

After working to start the first chapter of 100 Black Men in New Jersey in 1974, Hayling arrived here and said he felt “isolated. . . . There was no network of men who had accomplished things and who would give something back to the community. . . . They did not have this forum where they could help the underprivileged.”

Hayling and Ariston C. Marcos, a retired lithographer who moved here from New York, held the first meeting with six people in the home of a Los Angeles doctor, and the organization developed quickly, becoming one of seven 100 Black Men chapters in New York, Long Island, New Jersey, Atlanta, St. Louis and Indianapolis. The title of 100 Black Men was initially chosen for its effect, not as a limit on its membership.

This year the members have been assessed $1,000 each and must also support other group functions, such as the recent Christmas party at which the 100 Black Men hosted approximately 1,000 guests at an airport hotel.

The lion’s share of the money raised by the group benefits educational programs. “If a fellow has education, he can eliminate teen pregnancy, drug abuse and many other problems,” said Hayling, who is chief of ambulatory obstetrics and gynecology at UCLA-Drew Medical School. “If he doesn’t have that, he’s got no job, no self-esteem.”

Recognizing his work in New Jersey and Los Angeles, 100 Black Men has chosen Hayling its national president, and other chapters are imitating Los Angeles’ Young Black Scholars programs.

Jessie Mae Beavers, who has covered black family and society news for 30 years for the Los Angeles Sentinel newspaper, said that the 100 Black Men’s programs, such as Young Black Scholars, have made a big impression on the local black community in a short time.

“They’re very well-known,” said Beavers, executive editor of the newspaper’s family section. “They represent money which the community doesn’t really have. But all those people together are able to make a loud noise because when all their money is together they are able to do a big job. . . .

“People are fighting to buy tickets to go to fund-raisers. I think it’s because they put a lot of thought into it and they’re really enjoyable.

“You know, we haven’t had anything like this. We’ve had the Urban League and the NAACP and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and they all have programs that lend themselves to social needs.

“But the 100 Black Men are just a little different. They’re answering these social needs but also add to it a very genteel air. You get a chance to have a real social fling while you’re doing good for the misfortunate. I really like them.”