As the crow flies, it`s about 135 miles from the Englewood neighborhood to Illinois State University in Downstate Normal. But to a ghetto child trying to escape the rubble-strewn blocks of Chicago`s South Side, that distance has to be measured in cultural light-years.
”When I graduated, they voted me Most Likely to Succeed,” Maurice House said while sitting on the front steps of the run-down frame home his mother rents. ”It seems so long ago.”
In fact, it was in 1985 that House finished his senior year at nearby Robeson High School with a straight-A average. Then he set off for ISU`s bucolic campus full of the hope for a better future that inspires young people to be the first in a family to earn a college degree.
Now he is back in the neighborhood with a dropout slip instead of a diploma as witness to that ambition. Financial pressures, the crippling tug of family problems and the feeling of being in an alien world combined to cut short his college career.
”I wanted that piece of paper so bad, and not just to show myself I could accomplish something,” House said. ”It was for my folks and for friends who didn`t get a chance to go to college. That was my vision.”
What happens to a dream deferred? asked Langston Hughes, the great poet-narrator of black American life.
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore-
Today that question applies to many bright and talented young people like Maurice House. In the late 1960s and `70s, on the morrow of the civil rights revolution, black university enrollment rose dramatically, increasing the opportunity for blacks to move into the middle class. But in recent years, that trend first slowed, then reversed, though many blacks continue to succeed in college.
According to John Lee, a Washington-based educational consultant who studies minority affairs, U.S. Census data show that between 1970 and 1985 the percentage of white high school students going on to college increased to 59 percent from 52 percent while that of black students dropped to 45 percent from 48 percent, even though the numbers of blacks graduating from high school increased during that period.
Though the number of black females on campus is increasing, black male enrollment is declining. Reginald Wilson, director of minority concerns for the American Council on Education, said he expects the trend to continue.
Nor are university administrators unaware of the serious consequences of the problem. One after another has gone on record to say how eager he is to have more blacks in his student body; the problem is finding them.
”Nationwide, the problem is potentially catastrophic,” said Stephen Trachtenberg, president of Hartford University in Connecticut, who soon will assume that post at George Washington University. ”I work all the time trying to recruit talented minority students and so does every other college president I talk to.”
”All they need do is look around a neighborhood like ours, they`ll see plenty of college material going to waste,” replied Jacqueline Simmons, Maurice House`s high school principal. ”We work like the dickens to get our best seniors into college, but more and more aren`t able to stick it out for the full four years.”
Simmons is quick to note that she is not talking about marginal students. In the last few years some of Robeson High`s best and brightest have made an all-too-quick round trip to and from a college campus. One recent graduate left a pre-med program at Xavier University; another received a fully paid appointment to West Point, only to drop out to enlist in the Army. A third left the Naval Academy to join the Marine Corps.
Far from being academically unprepared, those young men had the solid records necessary to win a congressional appointment to one of the service academies. Like a lot of bright ghetto kids, they had found early on that books could be a psychological refuge from the dreary streets where they grew up.
Maurice House made that discovery at the Whitney Young branch of the Chicago Public Library. In the early 1980s, he recalled, 79th Street marked the dividing line between the territories of the Disciples and El Rukn street gangs. Walking home along it after school, he faced a daily interrogation.
” `What do you ride?` the gang-bangers would ask, meaning which gang did I belong to,” House recalled.
Fortunately, the nearby library was a neutral zone where he didn`t have to answer that question. So sometimes House would simply skip school and spend the whole day in that bookshelf-lined haven. There he fell in love with poetry and Greek mythology. Shakespeare and Homer, he was delighted to discover, had said things he himself felt but didn`t quite know how to express.
”I was especially fond of Mercury, the messenger of the gods, being a track man myself,” House said. ”Also Hercules, for toiling away at the labors to which he was sentenced.”
Looking down the street where House lives, a visitor can`t avoid thinking that the hurdles confronting this young man might have thrown even his ancient hero. In this part of Englewood whole blocks were leveled two decades ago during the heyday of urban renewal, but no new buildings ever replaced them. In places, grass and weeds now hide the foundations of those vanished structures, giving the lots an almost pastoral look.
The intersections, where little knots of well-dressed young men huddle, are a more reliable indicator of the local geography. ”Around here,” House said, pointing to one such scene, ”drugs are the only guaranteed job.”
He added that his struggle to stay in college provided those street-corner merchants with a little comic relief from their deadly serious business. Coming home for a weekend, he would be greeted with a chorus of taunts:
”Hey, Maurice, when you going wise up and make yourself some easy money?” one hanger-on would ask.
”Naw,” another would counter. ”Ain`t no room for bookworms in a gang.”
Even for an older generation of black people, noted Shirley Jones, a counselor at Du Sable High School, it is hard to imagine the strain of keeping up with studies against that kind of background noise. When Jones was a student in the 1960s, it was lonely being one of the few blacks on campus. But the loneliness was balanced by the excitement of the civil rights movement and the feeling that things were about to open up for blacks.
The young people she now works to get into college and to keep there grow up in a far less optimistic world. Many are from single-parent homes in which the only income is a welfare check, Jones said. Few have the opportunity to see busy and successful adults getting on with their lives.
”When my students get up in the morning, they`re the only one in the house stirring around,” Jones said. ”Some of my kids, I wonder how they have the courage to get up at all!”
Maurice House recalled that one of the biggest surprises awaiting him on ISU`s campus was the discovery that the kind of homes he had seen on television actually existed. ”My roommate came from a real `Leave It to Beaver` family,” House said. ”His parents were always calling to see how he was doing, and they`d bought him a van to come to college in.”
House got to campus differently. When they sat down to figure out his freshman-year finances, Maurice and his mother realized that though his scholarship and a student loan would cover tuition and room and board, there wouldn`t be anything left for incidental expenses, even enough to buy Maurice a bus ticket or train ticket to Normal.
Maurice hasn`t heard from his father in years, and his mother`s salary as a school-bus driver barely covers the rent and food. She also has to provide for his 18-year-old brother, as well as help out her own brother, who is disabled, and his young daughter, with whom they share an apartment. So just before the fall term opened, Maurice went to the local welfare office and signed up for General Assistance state aid. Afterward, he doubled back from Normal each month to pick up his $150 check.
House said he still recalls the cost to his self-respect. Mondays, his roommate would report weekend excursions in the van, exaggerating, as young men will, his success with the coeds. The last thing in the world House wanted was for anyone to know what he did on trips home.
Even between times, Englewood was rarely far from his thoughts. Ghetto families, noted Jacqueline Simmons, House`s high school principal, never run out of crises, and the bright and aggressive kid who is motivated to get an education is also likely to be the family linchpin.
”No sooner do they get to college,” Simmons said, ”than the phone calls start coming: `Your father`s drinking again,` their mother says. `Your little brother is running with the gangs. There`s no money in the house. I don`t know what to do.` ”
”It`s a real trap,” agreed Silas Purnell, director of Ada S. McKinley Educational Services Inc., who has spent 23 years helping ghetto kids get into college. ”When a youngster tells me he`s got to leave school to help his mother, I say: `Weren`t you living at home for a long time? How much were you able to help with her problems then?` But when the phone rings in their dorm room and Mother`s crying on the other end of the line, it`s real tough on them.”
When House got those phone calls, it doubled his anxiety about his course work. If he got a B instead of an A on a test, he said he would think: ”I am messing up here, while my mother needs me to help her out at home.” The other kids in his dorm could brag about a brother who was in medical school or about to take the bar exam; he didn`t have anyone to share his troubles with.
”Mostly, I`d get in the shower where nobody could hear me and cry,”
House said. ”I cried and I prayed a lot that year.”
The summer between his freshman and sophomore years, House worked in a neighborhood tutoring program. But another problem came up at home, and he wound up turning over his paycheck to his mother. So when autumn came, he told himself he didn`t have enough money to go back to ISU. Looking back, House realizes that the financial issue was a convenient way of avoiding a world he hadn`t understood-and one, it seems, that is equally unprepared to deal with inner-city young people like him.
”It wasn`t the money so much,” House said. ”I`d just felt so out of it down there and couldn`t see going back.”
Fall semester, he enrolled at the University of Illinois at Chicago. But by then he had just about run out of energy; even before midterm, he simply stopped going to class.
Since then, House has drifted from one minimum-wage job to another, trying to keep up with the $200 a month that came due on his student loans once he left school. For a while, he was a messenger in a downtown law firm. Now he is out of work, $2,000 in debt and, worst of all, totally out of ideas about what to do with the rest of his life.
”Our colleges just don`t know how to bridge the cultural gap to an inner-city kid so he will feel welcome on campus,” said Reginald Wilson of the American Council on Education. ”And that further complicates the already serious problem of black underrepresentation in higher education.”
The tragedy of Maurice House`s story, added Ernestine Curry, principal of Phillips High School, is its modest price tag. Like her counterparts at other ghetto schools, Curry has long since been accustomed to hearing from recent graduates at all hours of the day and night. Like House, they will have gone off to college only to find that loan money is delayed or that they hadn`t counted on the high cost of books.
Most of the time, they will only need $300 or $500 to tide them over, Curry noted. Fortunately, Phillips has a supportive alumni group, so she can usually find someone to help out a student.
”But some semesters I run out of money before my kids run out of problems,” Curry said. ”And that can make the difference between a youngster who stays in school and one who winds up hanging out on a ghetto street corner.”
Purnell, director of Ada S. McKinley Educational Services, noted that House and others like him might have been able to stick it out if only they had found an adult on campus to confide in. These days, Purnell said, universities and colleges have all sorts of counseling services for kids with academic difficulties. But few offer any kind of support for a black student trying to navigate through an unfamiliar world.
For his part, Maurice House recalled that when he was having difficulty with economics, he found an adviser who was good at helping him with his course work. Later, when he was feeling the emotional tug of those phone calls from home, he had an impulse to seek out the man again. But he was discouraged by the long lines in front of the counselor`s office door.
”The colleges are always screaming that they want more minority students,” Purnell said sadly. ”But I wonder why they don`t try taking a little better care of the ones they already have.”
