Silas Purnell’s voice booms above the chatter of parents and children waiting to meet with him in a pint-sized basement office in the Dearborn Homes public housing project on Chicago’s South Side.
“Why do you want to go to that school?” he sternly asks one youth.
“What am I supposed to do with you with these grades?” he says to another, chastising yet compassionate.
It’s a daily ritual for a 71-year-old former Coca-Cola marketing manager who is credited with assisting more than 40,000 black men and women to enroll in about 200 colleges and universities during the last 27 years.
Purnell runs the educational services division of Ada S. McKinley Community Services, one of Chicago’s largest social services agencies. Purnell’s program for black youths is financed by the U.S. Department of Education’s Talent Search Program.
He spurns suggestions that he take larger quarters downtown to better accommodate the visitors who now cram into a nondescript office. They come by the dozens, most looking for a way into college and out of public housing projects and other impoverished communities. Some wait eight hours or more to see him.
Drawing on his years of cultivating university contacts and tracking colleges that have aid for minority students but few of them, Purnell usually is able to find scholarships or grants. Some students are accepted on condition that they take remedial summer classes. For others, he finds tutors.
He is moved by statistics: 1.4 million black students in colleges nationwide represent only 9.6 percent of total college enrollment, up only slightly from the 9.2 percent of 1980; 40 percent of black youths drop out of high school each year.
“He does whatever it takes to get a student in college and give them the best chance for success,” said Brenda Fashola, a spokeswoman for McKinley. “If they need eye glasses, he buys them. If they need coats or transportation, he pays for it.”
Diedrus Brown-Underwood recalled that when she graduated from high school in the early ’70s, “My grades were so poor I was considered the most unlikely to succeed.” She now has a doctorate in education administration and supervision and is principal of Prairie Hills Junior High in Markham. “It was the time of gangs-the Blackstone Rangers, the Bowery Boys and the Disciples-and many of my friends were gang members.”
Her mother sent her to see Silas, as Purnell is generally called.
“He looked at my record, picked up the phone, called my mother and asked what she expected him to do with me,” Brown-Underwood said.
“I don’t know what she told him but he put the phone down and said, `You are going to Eastern (Illinois) University in Charleston, but you will have to go to summer school first.’ Then he told me that if I messed up, not to come back to him.”
At Eastern, away from gangbangers and the party life, Brown-Underwood flourished. She studied hard and accumulated a 3.75 (of 4) grade-point average. She went on to earn four degrees, a feat for which she was awarded a trophy and plaque by her former classmates at her 10-year high school class reunion.
“Silas is an amazing man,” Brown-Underwood said. “It is as if God gave him special insight to know where a student will fare best. He also has great marketing skills that allow him to make you think a D-student is the best student in the world.”
Matching students, schools
“Si is a wonderful friend of education,” said Hunter Rawlings, president of the University of Iowa, which regularly accepts students recommended by Purnell. “I visited his basement office in Chicago and was astounded to see what a beehive of activity it was. People were lined up to see him. I recall asking Si how we could get some of those students to visit Iowa. His response was, `You get me a bus and I will fill it.’
“We have been sending a bus every year since to bring students to campus for a two-day visit,” Rawlings said. “The buses always come back full. Students sent to us by Purnell do very well because of his ability to match students with schools at which they will be comfortable.”
“His life is a labor of love,” said Andre Grant, an attorney at the Chicago law firm of Stanley Hill & Associates, who credits Purnell with getting him into law school. “When I met him I found him loud, almost rude. You wait for hours to be badgered but also guided. He is a straightforward man who speaks his mind.”
“I wanted to go to law school in Chicago but he thought it best that I go to the University of Iowa where he felt I would receive more support.” Grant went to Iowa.
Sherwin Clark met Purnell in 1969 while working as a stock clerk at a supermarket. Had Purnell not ridiculed him as sorry and trifling he might not have been moved to go to college, he said. “He really got my dander up by saying I was pitiful and not up for the challenge,” Clark said.
Some 25 years later, an accounting degree under his belt, Clark is sometimes in a position to chide Purnell as a sorry client who doesn’t submit tax materials on time.
“He keeps information in his personal computer-his head,” said Rawlings. “He is not big on paper, he is not big on bureacracy and he is not big on formal organization. He does things informally and personally. That is what works for him.
“People trust him. They know they will get a straight answer and that answer might be that their choice is not the right school for them. We trust what he does for us and from what I could see down there in that basement, families trust what he does for them.”
A personal tragedy
Purnell has been married to his wife, Marilyn, 40 years and they have three daughters and a son. Another son, Silas Jr., drowned in 1970 at a public swimming pool across from the family home at 90th Street and St. Lawrence. He had graduated from high school a few weeks earlier.
Purnell does not like to discuss the tragedy and says only that “it is just one of those terrible things you have no control over. You just put it behind you and do your best to go on.” Friends said the death strengthened his resolve to help children. But he denies it played a part. “I always have been committed to helping young people.
“I like to work with the students nobody else wants,” he said recently, leaning back in a well-worn chair and touching a finger to his cheek.
“I don’t believe in putting students through hoops to get into university but in clearing a path for them,” he said. “Our most pressing problem is not the lack of jobs but the lack of education.”
Students should not be judged solely by raw grades and test scores, he said, but also by what they endured in life. “I look at one case of a man who is now a surgeon. You know that if he is board certified, he had to pass all his exams. Yet somebody made a decision about him years ago by saying, `low grade-point average, not college material, low test scores, not college material.”‘
He tells the story of a woman who came to him decades ago, determined to go to college despite dismal grades. Her words, he said, still inspire him.
“I really didn’t think I could help her because her preparation seemed so poor. But she said, `You may know my preparation but you don’t know my desperation, there is nowhere I can go but up,’ ” he said. “I knew I had to help her. We now say, `Come wherever you are, and we’ll find a place for you.’ “
Purnell began his efforts 27 years ago after noticing that most of the young people working behind the counters at fast food restaurants wore high school graduation rings.
“I asked some of them why they were not in college and they said they had no money,” he said. “I asked if they would go if they had the money and they said yes. I began inviting myself to meetings by college administrators and persuading them to take a chance on these students.
“There are very few students who can’t make it. The bulk of our students who fall by the wayside are students who are not willing to do what they are supposed to. If a student is having academic problems we can get them into a place that will work with those problems.
Telling the truth
“Part of what I do is tell them the truth about what to expect and what will be expected of them, that life will be different from Chicago if they go to school in Montana or Texas. I explain that if they get into trouble in one of those places they may find themselves arrested in the morning, being tried at noon and eating dinner in the joint.
“In Chicago it might take eight months or two years before your trial comes up. Of course I also tell them if they do get arrested don’t call me, we are not a bonding office.”
Sometimes his students are hampered by unrealistic expectations.
“Everybody comes in here wanting to go to the University of Chicago, Northwestern, Harvard and Stanford but with Malcolm X (Community College) grades,” he said.
In some cases Purnell has helped two or three generations of a family attend college. One different but notable success was opening the doors of college for Helen Barge, a mother of 10 children.
Now a clinical psychologist at Unity Hospice, 6125 S. Kenwood Ave., Barge recalls appealing to Purnell for help after deciding she did not like a new job moving mail sacks at the post office.
“I told myself God did not give me brains to work at the post office pulling mail sacks, and decided I wanted to go to DePaul University,” Barge said. “I asked for financial aid and was told the school had none. On my way out, a woman came up to me and handed me a note with Silas Purnell’s name and number on it and told me to call him.
“He was bittersweet and lovingly sarcastic. (But) he saw that I was serious and helped.”
Purnell got Barge into DePaul with a generous financial package. He subsequently helped 7 of her 10 children enter college.
His efforts have received good grades from the Department of Education, which recently approved nearly $1 million in funding over four years for the program.
And last month, hundreds of those he had helped gathered to praise him at a black-tie tribute at the Palmer House.
Brown-Underwood came and announced that she would create a Silas Purnell Foundation through which businesses and corporations can support his efforts.
“All of us who have been touched by him come back with a sense of wanting to give something back,” she said, “to help others as he helped us.”
