Largest class graduates from elite Morehouse College, defying stats for young black men

(AP) From the first day on campus, every one of them was told he was destined for greatness and could achieve no less.

They would become Morehouse Men.

They would be scholars and leaders, compelled by their years at Morehouse College, the nation's only all-male historically black college, to make a difference in a world where statistics too often label other young black men as drains on society.

The school graduated 540 new Morehouse men this month, the largest graduating class in the 139-year history of the institution whose alumni include the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and actor Samuel L. Jackson.

"The Morehouse Man is exceptional because the expectation at the school is that he is to walk on water...," explained 23-year-old Donald Washington, Jr. "He is supposed to make the impossible possible."

Washington is familiar with the impossible. As a high school junior, he was homeless, living in shelters around Washington, D.C., with his mother, Harriet Wilkes. He wasn't thinking about going to college, but his mom encouraged him, telling him he had too much talent not to pursue an education.

It was the vice principal of his high school who gave him the idea of where to go.

"You look like a Morehouse Man to me," Washington remembers him saying.

After three years at Montgomery College's Rockville and Silver Spring, Md., campuses, he received a full scholarship and transferred to Morehouse, one of five historically black colleges comprising the Atlanta University Center. Sitting at a table wearing a blue suit, wire-framed glasses and a pensive look on his clean-shaven face, Washington admits he lacked confidence when he first arrived on campus.

"Before, I was the lamp under the table," he said. "Now, I light up the whole room." The new graduate will spend the next year working on a project training youth near campus in King's nonviolence methods.

Many such youth face daunting odds. A series of recent studies has bemoaned the national plight of black men. One, titled "Black Males Left Behind," detailed a staggering correlation between lack of education and incarceration and unemployment rates, said co-author Stephen Raphael, associate professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley.

Of black men between ages 18 and 25 who dropped out of high school, only 27 percent were employed in 2000, compared to 50 percent in 1970, the study found. Of that same pool, 8 percent were incarcerated in 1970, versus 23 percent three decades later.

Contrast such gloomy figures with the Morehouse motto: "And there was light."

"There is this beacon out there that says if you create a challenging, demanding, yet nurturing and supportive environment, if you show these young men the possibilities and you discipline them to realize those possibilities, you can turn these statistics about black men around," said Michael Lomax, United Negro College Fund president and a 1968 graduate of Morehouse.

The high sense of self-worth typical of Morehouse Men is often attributed to the legacy of its longest-serving president, Benjamin Elijah Mays, who died in 1984. The son of sharecroppers from Ninety Six, S.C., he led the school from 1940 to 1967, transforming it from a humble college founded soon after the Civil War to prepare freed black men for the ministry and teaching.

Today, Morehouse stands as the largest private, liberal arts college for men, and one of only four all-male colleges in the country.

"What Dr. Mays and other faculty members here led me and all of us to see was that simply because we came from small Southern towns didn't mean we were not as intelligent, just not as well prepared _ yet," said current Morehouse President Walter Massey, a 1958 alumnus who came from Hattiesburg, Miss.

"He led us to believe that if you graduate from Morehouse, there's nothing you can't achieve."

Perseverance and passion are the keys, he and others said, not privilege _ three-fourths of students are on federal financial aid.

That drive is seen in students like English major Alan Clarke of Andover, Mass., this year's valedictorian, and economics major Chris Campbell of Gastonia, N.C.

Both were star athletes in their hometowns and both were eager to prove themselves as scholars.

Clarke said he was put in lower-level classes at the private high school he attended because he was an athlete.

"That limited my progress," he said. "At Morehouse, the only 'x-factor' was the amount of work I was willing to put in."

Campbell's father died before he was born, and his mother, Charlene, dropped out of school in the 11th grade. Most of his childhood friends now sell drugs. "We don't have too much in common," he said.

His background drove him to create the Cardinal Mentoring Program when he was a sophomore at Morehouse. This year, the non-profit program to help high school students will award four $1,000 college scholarships _ including one named for his mother.

Campbell leaned in as he talked about the program he'll leave in the hands of two students after he graduates to become a pharmaceutical salesman.

"I want to mentor the kid who's like me, the kid who's from the 'hood, from the ghetto, who has so much potential but because of their 'hood or where they grew up, they get complacent," Campbell said. "I was here to say, 'I did it, you can do it.'"

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On the Net:

Morehouse College: http:http://www.morehouse.edu

Cardinal Mentoring Program: http://www.cardinalmentoring.org