Students Who’ve Broken the Brick Ceiling

Until he was 4 years old, Ricardo Blackett lived in “the projects,” one more unnoticed mustard seed fallen upon the hard, cracked pavement of urban poverty. His father, an auto mechanic from Barbados, was seldom around. His mother worked in a hospital kitchen, struggling to raise seven children.

Even when she managed to move her family into what she called “my shack,” a tiny, aging row house on Baltimore’s predominantly black West Side, she made only $18,000 a year. And the area slid downhill so fast that neighbors around the corner put up signs threatening to report drug customers who parked at the curb.

This month, as Blackett, 21, finishes his junior year in engineering at the University of Delaware, he depends on a strategy for survival honed by years of determination to achieve something better. Whatever the problem--his mother critically ill, his brother wrecked on cocaine, his grown sister and her children having to move in with his mother, Ricardo Blackett puts his head in his books and studies.

“You can’t just forget about everything at home, because home is still home,” Blackett says. But “you have to put it on the back burner until your work is done.”

Blackett and students like him represent glimmers of hope amid the despair of today’s inner-city neighborhoods and the troubled schools that serve them. Despite obstacles that stymie millions of their peers across the nation, these students are proof that it is still possible, at least for a determined few, to excel. Taken together, they comprise an honor roll of anonymous courage.

Every case is different. Each survivor, like Blackett, has a highly personal strategy, but all share certain common traits.

At home, they lean on a supportive parent or grandparent. On the street, they sidestep the temptations that ensnare their friends. At school, they ferret out teachers who care, haunting their offices, calling them at home, grabbing at the smallest opportunity.

Like immigrants from distant lands, they make themselves outsiders. They turn away from the people and cultures they grew up with and move toward places where they may never feel entirely comfortable or welcome.

“You can find teachers in every school who make a difference in the lives of their students,” says Freeman A. Hrabowski III, president of the University of Maryland Baltimore County. But “when you find inner-city students who have succeeded, they have developed a great deal of inner strength.”

Certainly that’s what Blackett relied on when his mother got sick. Or when he left his new bicycle chained to the banister in his mother’s house, only to discover that his older brother, Rodney, had cut it loose and sold it to buy crack. Or when Rodney stole his new winter coat and sold it, then stole and sold the replacement. And when he slipped the hinges off the door to Ricardo’s room to steal whatever else he could find. Or when his sister, Angela, and her children moved into his mother’s home and Rodney, 28--in jail again for domestic violence--tried to get his mother to put up the little house for bail money.

Lessons from a high school teacher helped, Blackett says. “She said, ‘Just do your work. . . . Remember where you came from. Stay grounded and get your work done. That’s the most important thing.’ ”

Here are the stories of these survivors. None are sports stars, musical prodigies or famous. They are young adults who came of age at a time of trouble, whose stories are writ large in the annals of one city’s schools.

Succeeding Through Sustained Willpower

Sherry Evans imagined the world she wanted to live in someday and then--through sheer, sustained willpower--she conducted herself as though she were already there.

Never mind that the reality around her was what Mary Collins, chief guidance counselor at Frederick Douglass High School, calls “the heart of the city, the bad part.” Never mind that Douglass Principal Rose Backus-Davis, striving to help a failing school climb out of the abyss, had to confront gang leaders herself to get them off school property. That Backus-Davis counts it progress--hard-won, beaming-with-pride progress--that her lacrosse team can play in the city finals without “jumping the referees.”

In such an environment, Evans clung to an image of herself as a successful middle-class person. To meet her now, entering her second year at Morgan State University in Baltimore after finishing second in her high school class, is to meet the person her imagination designed. Only 18 years old, she wears a dark green double-breasted suit with discrete pinstripes and a professional woman’s low-heeled shoes. Carriage erect. Demeanor formal.

“I tried to be different,” she says. “I dressed different. I acted different. My aura was different. However I felt at the moment, I wasn’t going to show it. . . . I was determined to be successful--to dress and carry myself so I could be successful.”

“Suits, vests; never tennis shoes, always low-heeled shoes and stockings. Nails always done. Hair always done. Never anything out of place,” says English teacher Jacqueline Butler. “That’s Sherry Evans.”

Appearance was only part of it.

Evans consciously shaped every aspect of her life in accordance with the world she meant to inhabit. She resisted low standards in school and low aspirations among her fellow students. In high school, when teachers asked too little, her parents made supplemental assignments of their own.

Evans’ strategy extended beyond school to the friendships she would make and not make, the parties she attended and those she avoided, even the hours she was out of her house. All were controlled, first to reflect the values of her future life, and second to reduce exposure to the hazards around her.

“I think a lot of people would survive if they created a good environment for themselves,” she says. “I tried to limit the number of people I got close to. . . . I tried to keep people around me who . . . had the same background.”

Evans gives much credit to her strict but attentive parents. Her father is a construction worker, her mother a secretary in city government. “My father, Mr. Lawrence Evans Sr., was important because I looked to him for an example of how a gentleman should treat a lady. My mother, Shirley Evans, was an example of how a young lady should always present herself.

“And they instilled in me to always try to go farther than normal,” Evans says. “What’s your goal?” her mother once asked.

“To be a lawyer.”

“Go higher.”

“To be a judge.”

“Go higher.”

“To be a justice on the Supreme Court.”

Teachers insist that Evans was universally respected by her peers. “Even though she created her own world, so to speak, she commanded the respect of everybody,” says Butler, the English instructor, “from the worst hooligans, this girl was respected.”

But Mamie Clark, a business education teacher, remembers Evans being picked on in her early years at Douglass, jostled on the stairs, occasionally hit by suspicious students, some of whom raised the charge that she was “acting white.”

Evans’ response to taunts that she was acting white was: “When people came to me and said you’re doing that, I thought they were being a little ignorant. Being American means genetic assimilation, a lot of different things, cultures. . . . That’s not being white. That’s wanting to achieve.”

In the end, her world narrowed to little more than her parents, several trusted faculty members and just four kids: two boys and two girls. On weekends, instead of hanging out in the neighborhood, they would travel across the city or out into the suburbs to the affluent sections of Baltimore. “We went to different malls in different areas outside what we saw every day,” she says.

They went to places where they could see trees or water--”more sentimental places. [And] we looked at poetry,” she says.

One of the things that kept Evans focused was the death of her friend, Simon Davis, the son of a Baltimore police officer who was remembered by guidance counselor Collins as “very quiet, very cooperative, nice and smart, very studious.”

He never did anything wrong, did almost everything right. But as Evans sees it, he just let his guard down ever so slightly. That was all it took. He was killed in a petty bus stop robbery--the sort of late-night exposure to danger that Evans meticulously avoided.

“It wasn’t really gangs or drugs or anything like that. It was just that when he began to hang out with other people, he became less careful. . . . He started with people more into partying and staying out real late. When you do that, you’re not being careful, and anything can happen.”

She speaks with a fatalism that seems dreadful in one so young. “As far as it happening to me, it would just have to be my time,” she says.

Her counselor, Collins, summed up Evans’ view: “Abstinence, that’s the way you can get ahead.”

Saved by Fast Food and Divine Intervention

Shaylin Holley was heading for trouble when he suddenly turned around. Seeing the downward spiral of friends caught his attention, but he was saved primarily by God and Burger King.

“Shaylin was a very nasty little guy when I taught him in ninth grade,” English teacher Butler remembers.

“He was an angry kid then,” agrees Clarice Herbert, a Spanish teacher who is helping Holley pursue a newfound interest in politics. “He tried to intimidate you with words and gestures and his loud voice.”

Holley’s mother was a single parent with two children, surviving with a job as a school crossing guard. Holley says he was “wanting to hang out with the big boys,” staying away from school, out on the street after curfew. “I thought the material things I wanted I could get from hanging with the crowd.”

With low grades and a bad attitude, Holley failed to win admission to Baltimore’s more selective magnet schools and landed at Frederick Douglass High School.

With its dignified brick and mortar and its proud heritage as alma mater to Thurgood Marshall, Cab Calloway and other illustrious African Americans, Douglass has a proud tradition.

Today, however, it has been targeted by the state as a failed school. About 70% of its students drop out before graduation, though most of the graduates go on to college. Backus-Davis, along with a cadre of teachers and others who share her belief in what needs to be done, is leading the effort to save it.

During his first two years at Douglass, Holley continued to slip. “He definitely was going down the wrong path,” Herbert says.

But Holley began noticing changes in his street friends. “There were a couple of neighbors who were not going to school, out of school for months and months. I would see how their whole persona, their whole appearance, their vocabulary wasn’t up to par. . . . The type of image, the type of energy you could get from them was negative vibes.

“I told myself that was not what I want to do.”

More concretely, a cousin helped him get a job at Burger King and “my whole perspective changed when I got that $4.15, that $4.30 an hour. I began to think long-term, not short-term,” Holley says. The things he had sought on the street were within reach with his own money.

Beyond these immediate factors, Holley, a tall, affable young man with a commanding manner, says that what turned him around was religion. He doesn’t make a huge thing out of it. Some people, some teachers, he says, “opened up avenues to God for me.”

Why did it happen? “I don’t know. He put His hand on me. He saw me coming up, I guess, and out of the many, He picked me.”

“Shaylin made some inner determination,” Herbert says, “because we can influence them to an extent, but they have to make the decision which path they want.

“He came to me one day and I just happened to mention the Student Government Assn. elections. He got involved. I didn’t think he was serious about that, but he was. And I realized I had a changed person on my hands.”

Since then, Holley has been elected student body president, served as a page in the Maryland Assembly in Annapolis, become a delegate to the City Youth Government, been accepted to college this fall and even jousted successfully with Baltimore Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke over money for the city’s schools.

Schmoke had turned down a school board request to cover a $1-million deficit. Holley, 17, decided to challenge him at a public forum. At first, Schmoke defended his decision. But seemingly in mid-stride, he reversed himself and declared that the schools would get the funds. “I call Shaylin ‘million-dollar man,’ ” Herbert says.

What those who have known Holley find most striking about him is how he has navigated the particular shoals that wait for males in neighborhoods like his. “The pressures that a young black male in the city has to face are real and different,” Clark declares. “Look at what they have to face every day. They are the heroes. Death looks them in the face every day.

“Boys are supposed to be tough. Their manhood gets challenged. . . . You walk around like a Harvard professor up here, you’re going to have to prove yourself.”

Holley has found a way to do that. “He is able to walk on both sides, though he is an outsider,” Herbert says. How he does it is hard for teachers to describe. They are, after all, outsiders themselves when it comes to the inner-city youth culture.

“It has something to do with how he handles himself. . . . Even the way he dresses is different. He’ll wear a suit to school, almost a yuppie look, but not quite, and they like it,” Herbert adds.

“There’s something that says: ‘I’m over here, but I’ve been there.’ They recognize it and leave him alone.”

Educators like Herbert and Clark, Butler, Collins and Backus-Davis wear their lives out for victories like Holley’s. “I’m extremely proud of him, almost like my son,” Herbert says shyly.

“Seeing African American males beat the system and make it, I’ll be there as long as I can.”

The Other Side of the Mountain--and Back

Collette London, on the other hand, is why inner-city schoolteachers get gray hair. If Shaylin Holley turned back at the edge of the cliff, London went straight off the edge: She had a baby.

“At one time,” guidance counselor Collins says, “just meeting her, you’d have thought she was another Sherry Evans,” a model student and model young woman, the last person anyone expected to get pregnant.

“But she started dating. . . ,” says Collins, her fatalistic tone implying there’s no need to finish the sentence.

It wasn’t just the dating. London, now 17, had bounced around as a child, living with her mother, then her father, then back to uneasy residence with her mother. She was also abused by her mother’s boyfriend when she was 12.

Having a baby jolted London academically. It damaged her relationship with her father, a counselor for retarded youth in Connecticut, and with her mother, a pharmacist’s technician living in Baltimore. And, statistically at least, it raised the odds against success at every stage of her future.

Yet, as she seemingly has with the other problems in her life, London is clambering back--with attitude. Lots of attitude. Indeed, attitude may be her secret weapon.

Characteristically, she carries her 10-month-old daughter, Cara, defiantly before her like the pillar of fire. “I’ve been going here for a year and three months, and most of the students just found out I had a baby, because I’m doing what I’m supposed to be doing,” she declares. “I got my 98, I got my A-plus and I’m out. That proves something to me, and it should prove something to anybody else!

“I guess you could say I’m carrying a chip on my shoulder. But it’s slowly drifting away.”

Being very smart has helped, teachers say. So has knowing how to work hard.

Most important, perhaps, is the fact that London never buys into the widespread notion that striving for something better means betraying who you are and where you come from.

“That’s an argument I get into all the time,” she says. “They say: ‘What are you?’ I say: ‘American.’ They say: ‘Aren’t you proud of being African American?’ It’s not that. . . . I’m proud of being me.

“I tell them there’s no such thing as acting white. I hate those words.” Rejecting the idea that people are little more than colors in a box of labeled crayons, she insists: “I’m not Crayola.”

By early June, she had become valedictorian of her class. And she scored 980 on her College Boards, on a scale of 400 to 1600.

Typically, though, she’s enrolled in a cram course and plans to take the exams again and get her score above 1,000--the magic number for a full scholarship at Morgan State.

“I’m getting that full scholarship,” she declares. “I’m getting those 20 points.”

Struggling to Beat Inner City’s Problems

By now, it’s no secret that public schools serving inner-city populations are awash with problems. Across the country, 8.1 million students attend central-city schools, more than 40% of whom are poor. Many sit in under-equipped classrooms, surrounded by peers who cannot perform basic skills at grade level. Inadequately trained, overwhelmed or burned-out teachers are unable either to challenge students’ minds or demand their best efforts. And good, dedicated teachers--less rare than is widely supposed--struggle against the effects of dysfunctional families that are indifferent or outright hostile to education.

Inner-city high schools “are the weakest link in our educational institutions right now,” says Melissa Roderick of the University of Chicago, who heads a long-term study of inner-city education. Students “should be mad as hell at those high schools.”

But there are exceptions, and students like Collette London and Shaylin Holley, Sherry Evans and Ricardo Blackett have a way of finding them.

Gloria Tillery, head of the guidance office at Baltimore’s elite Polytechnic Institute, from which Blackett graduated, is personally responsible for counseling more than 300 students a year, but she remembers Blackett because he was always in her office.

“He came down every day,” she says. “I guess something in him struck me as being very special, and it seemed that somehow he had perceived that there was something else out there and he wanted it very much. . . . You don’t see that hunger in everybody.”

Still, getting Blackett launched on the first-class mechanical engineering program to which he aspired was not easy.

Tillery urged him to apply to the University of Delaware, knowing that it had been recruiting African Americans from the area. He was accepted, but “he had not seen the campus and there was no one to take him,” Tillery says. So she drove him the 60 miles herself. “A large part of the challenge is to be encouraging and supportive and to let them know the world does not end at their block, that there’s a world beyond Baltimore.”

Blackett liked what he saw, but financial hurdles almost stopped him. Delaware has a well-established program to support minority students in the College of Engineering, which Blackett credits with helping him stay the course once he enrolled. But he balked at the financial aid package he was offered.

“They even wanted my mother to take out a loan. I really didn’t want my mother to take a loan. I figured I wouldn’t be going here.”

Tillery called school officials herself. They increased Blackett’s grants and reduced the loans. “It really would be a crime to have somebody with this ability and character just fall through the cracks,” Tillery says.

Barbara Thomas, Blackett’s mother, never meant for her youngest child to fall through the cracks. Sitting in the small, scarred dining room of her house on Grantley Street, she talks about how she always knew he could do more.

“At Christmas, he would take all his toys upstairs and put them in a big plastic bag. If the grandchildren hadn’t lived here, every toy he ever got he’d still have.

“Sometimes when you have children, you know which ones are weak and which ones are strong,” she says. “I believe he was born an old man.”

And she was intent on protecting him, even from his father.

Blackett’s father, too, emphasized the importance of more education, but Thomas feared he would tear his son down with constant criticism.

One day, she remembers, “I said, ‘Why don’t you keep out of his face? I don’t want him to grow up like me. He’s not going to grow up like you either.’

“He’s going to be different.”