When a college expo’s a party too
Shrieking, hollering and even crying, future college students, their friends, parents and a few little brothers and sisters shout out their adoration for actor and rapper Nick Cannon, the biggest draw at the Black College Expo on Saturday at the Los Angeles Convention Center.
“Education is key,” Cannon tells them. “Keep your mind on school.”
That is not the message they came to hear from him.
“Gigolo ... ,” he sings to cheers.
As he raps, he removes his pink button-down, now among the latest hip-hop street fashions, which he has paired with baggy jeans and brown “Tims,” short for Timberland boots. He strips to his undershirt. He takes that off and flings it into the crowd as it gets even louder.
This is a scene not to be missed if you are young, gifted and black.
Or not.
Entertainers like Cannon, who currently plays a high school senior trying to win a college scholarship in the film “Love Don’t Cost a Thing,” have turned this annual college fair intended to introduce local students to historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) into a party.
Like halftime at Howard University’s homecoming, it is part fashion show. These teenagers wear the latest Ecko, Baby Phat, Fetish and Rocawear. No matter the color -- pastel pink, bright turquoise, light blue, neon yellow or that Burberry plaid -- the shirt and the shoes must match.
Like during lunchtime at Spelman, the best-dressed girls, and there are thousands of them here, dip into their big Louis Vuitton carry-alls, Coach bags (with matching hats) and Gucci purses.
They check each other out.
“Ooh, he’s fine,” says Michelle Perell, 20 and a student at L.A. City College, as she strolls past the booth for Prairie View A&M; University near Houston.
Her friend, Pamela Gonzalez, 18, responds, “I’m trying to get me a college, while you’re looking at guys.”
There is a lot of that going on.
“Pay attention,” a mother snaps at her gorgeous son as he stares at girls. She slaps the back of his head. And for that reason, the Fairfax High School senior doesn’t want to give his name. He walks over to the booth for North Carolina A&T; University, which is Jesse Jackson’s alma mater.
At the booth for Wilberforce University, Sparkle French explains why she chose the small black college near Dayton, Ohio, after finishing Crenshaw High School in Los Angeles.
“The teachers care,” she says of the university she graduated from in 2002.
“There’s a family atmosphere. Everybody seems to know everybody.” That’s easily possible on a campus with 800 students, one of whom is her younger sister.
French is wearing a straw hat proclaiming her sorority, Zeta Phi Beta. Because today is her 25th birthday, a fistful of dollars is pinned to her shirt, a tradition she brought back from Wilberforce. Now a social worker, she is one of hundreds of alumni who are talking up their alma maters.
With more than 50,000 in attendance at the expo, lines form everywhere -- stretching longer than the length of a football field for the entertainment, headlined by Cannon and also including the romantic balladeer Brian McKnight, rapper Warren G. and old-school songbird Angela Winbush.
The lines are long for another reason. This year, unlike years past, the fifth annual Black College Expo requires everyone who wants to enjoy the entertainment to get stamps from three colleges and attend at least one seminar on preparation, hot careers or financial aid, or be caught dead at the one for parents.
“I want them to earn it,” expo founder Theresa Price says. Without these requirements, many youngsters would head straight for the fun: the dance contests, the mini basketball court, the flashy new Fords and the “step shows,” those precisely synchronized marching, dancing and singing routines performed by members of black fraternities and sororities.
Price, who owns a full-service marketing company, developed the expo to introduce local teenagers to historically black campuses because she had never heard of them when she chose Cal State Long Beach. “I felt left out,” she says.
Left out, she continues, from the “passion” that comes from attending a school that provides a lasting African American identity. She now knows instantly the meaning of a “Morehouse man,” shorthand for a polished, accomplished gentleman like that Atlanta college’s most famous alumnus, Martin Luther King Jr.
Left out, she adds, from lifelong friendships across the country, battles of the bands -- like the one featured in Cannon’s breakout film, last year’s surprise hit “Drumline” -- and other black school traditions.
Price doesn’t want other Los Angeles students to be left out. She invites to her annual college fair representatives of HBCUs, many of which were founded to educate freed slaves or to accommodate African Americans when they couldn’t attend segregated universities in the South. This year, 50 schools came.
So did vendors, some, like Angelene George, with advice such as what to do on a bad hair day, like on a rainy day at Hampton.
“I got tired of rolling my hair,” says George, who graduated from Lincoln University -- the one in Pennsylvania, not Missouri. So she made hats and attached hair: curls, braids, even dreadlocks.
Guys can take Nick Cannon’s approach. He wears a white “do-rag.”
His movie mother, actress Vanessa Bell Calloway, joins him on the stage.
An Ohio University graduate, she asks him, “Did you go to college?”
“Twice,” replies Cannon, who attended Santa Monica Community College. “School is the most important thing.”
Then he interrupts the concert as the first of several fights breaks out. Eventually the police are forced to stop the step show before members of the nation’s oldest black sorority, Alpha Kappa Alpha, can perform.
