A native of Washington, D.C., Hill attended the Groton School from 9th through 12th grade (III Former through IV Former), graduating in the Class of 1980. Hill received a Bachelor’s Degree in Applied Mathematics/ Economics from Brown University in 1984. After cutting his teeth at Brown University’s WBRU-FM as a college student, he got his break into the music industry as the program director of WILD-AM in Boston, MA. Subsequent to that gig, he moved on to the ABC Radio Networks, as the first executive producer for the Tom Joyner Morning Show. Hill also taught math at the Groton School for three years. He even was director of music programming for fellow VIACOM channel, MTV.

Hill returned to Groton School to teach math for three years. He now serves on the board of trustees, a diverse school community devoted to inspiring character, leadership, and service. He is also on the board for Life Beat, a music industry based organization that fights AIDS through education and awareness. Hill is a heavy supporter of Project Match, which matches underprivileged children with prep schools. He is also a mentor with Viacom’s notable ‘Get Schooled’ initiative. Hill takes a special interest in guiding and advising some of the younger kids within the company – who consider Hill’s pink eccentric office THE source of entertainment at BET.

http://abclocal.go.com/wabc/video?id=8493364

This excerpt from this week’s issue (Nov 8, 2010) of The New Yorker magaine  captures Shange’s experience as a PSN.

Shange’s various internal schisms – the fact that, as a Barnard student, she was more entitled than many of the white girls she’d gone to school with, for instance – were not lost on her. “Before I went to college, I went to the S.N.C.C. office three times a week to offer my services and catch up on my Liberator magazine.  The other two days I went to the Lycée Français to keep my French crisp,” she told me. “I felt comfortable in the diversity of my worlds. This continued until one of my floormates took some earrings and a dress from my room, and told me I had too much anyway.  That’s when I realized there was something different about perceptions of me.” Eventually, she learned to put her divisions to use. To (Serena Anderlini, writer), she said, “Some people might think that I am a ‘doctor’s daughter,’ and I have been privileged, true, but I also know how to get from Little Italy through Little Puerto Rico to midtown to where the ‘niggers’ are.  By myself. Without getting killed.” Shange could talk “street” and “siddity.” She was the daughter that Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man would never have imagined fathering.

[Excerpt from The New Yorker, Nov 8, 2010, “Color Vision” By Hilton Als]

Order the full article here: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/11/08/101108fa_fact_als

Prep School Hero
- Jean Tickell

André Lee ’89 always knew he wanted to make a film about his experience as a Community Scholar at GFS.  By 2006, the independent filmmaker had secured funding and begun to create a sweeping survey of students of color at independent schools in America.  But as the project evolved, it became a very personal autobiographical journey.  Now he’s touring the country with his profoundly moving documentary…
Download the full article here: GFS Bulletin Spring2010

—

School Begins

On the first day of kindergarten I wore a green outfit. The skirt ended right above my knees, which were shiny with a coat of Vaseline. My socks were edged in lace, feet shod in black patent leather because white patent leather was vulgar. There is a picture from that morning. I am tiny, 5 but smaller than a 5 year old should be. My skin is brown, but still has a certain pale quality of the sort that is there before many years of sun deepen you. My smile shows no teeth, but I can see in my own face how proud I am of my outfit. After all, I was dressed the way you are supposed to dress on the first day of school when you are from Alabama.

But I wasn’t in Alabama anymore. I began kindergarten in Cambridge, MA.  We had moved there a few days before the school year began so that my mother could earn a doctorate from Harvard University. After my mother chose her graduate school, she carefully selected a progressive small elementary school run by the Friends Meeting for me. She was preparing me for a life of meaning, but also for an integrated life, one that from early on would be a realization of the beloved community she and others had fought so hard for in the Movement.

On my first day of school, in 1977, we 5 and 6-year-olds began the day by sitting in a circle.  I know it was a circle but in truth the other children appeared to me like they created a straight line, a row of faces, some with nearly transparent eyes, eyes that looked like unusual marbles, others with two tones: chocolate around a black pupil. There were freckles on many peach faces, ruddy or rosy cheeks and straight hair that scattered across foreheads, down backs, over the shoulders of shirts in olive and brown and dark blue. I faced that line, and felt the gulf between us. None of their limbs were shiny. None of them wore barrettes that looked like bluebirds singing. None of them had walked into school looking down at their beautiful patent leather shoes and wishing they weren’t just for the first day. None had eyes like me, so dark they looked like glossy pitch, or skin so brown.

Something happened and everyone stood up, I scrambled to my feet a few seconds late. Then the other children began to move about, choosing activities. In retrospect, I think the teacher must have given some instructions but I hadn’t heard them. I stood paralyzed. A slim faced boy named Johnny came up to me and asked, “What is your name again?” and I was grateful to him for the next 7 years I would know him. He recognized me as real in that space so unfamiliar that I hadn’t been sure I existed.

High School

I was in the second generation of Black children in elite white schools. But knowledge of how to navigate such places wasn’t passed along to us. So it was like we were beginning again. I have a trinitarian tradition, just as I lived in three regions by age five, I went to three different high schools, and later earned three graduate degrees trying to find a place where I didn’t feel like a square peg. I eventually realized that was an impossibility: the juxtaposition of my body, my family, my communities, my history was too much. I was not “just like” any of my peers. There were none who could fully understand my story of interracial parentage yet salt of the earth Blackness, of multi-class identity, of Boursin cheese and watermelon, of starched Sunday dresses and holey jeans.  Yet I settled at a very special place, Concord Academy. Special because individuality was valued, and so even though I was not comfortable in my own skin, I was not a problem because of my strangeness.

My junior year we passed a demo tape around school that was produced by the sister of our theater teacher, Derrick. The duo were called Jonatha and Jennifer. They harmonized beautiful neo-folk original songs. My favorite was Grace in Gravity, a plaintive account of a Black South African ballet dancer who was paralyzed after paramedics failed to treat her. It was a repetition of the kind of stories I was raised on, of cruel inequality. Concord Academy students against apartheid waged its own small divestment campaign- our class rings came from Jostens that guaranteed they did no business in South Africa. Thandi, a South African woman who made her way to CA via the Bronx ensured that the values weren’t abstractions but based in sincere political engagement. Maybe not the beloved community (I did have a classmate who tried to convince me his ancestors had been good slavemasters) but it was a place where work towards it was being done. And yet I remained in some profound way unsettled.

One afternoon Mrs. Eisendrath, the Art History teacher ran to me from across the open green that sits in the middle of CA’s campus, with tears streaming down her face. “You are the only one who understands” she said, “What it means to be homesick wherever you go.”  Yes, that was a big part of it.

At Concord Academy, students were required to participate in a sport each season. Team sports were not my thing. They required too complex a negotiation of time and space for someone who already had an exhausting commute to the suburbs five days a week. And so most of the time I fulfilled the sports requirement with dance, but sometimes I did aerobics. In the aerobics class black girls were overrepresented. I’m not quite sure why, except perhaps because the WASP ideal of the scholar-athlete wasn’t matched in the African American community, at least not for very smart girls. We were supposed to be scholars, period, and most of our families weren’t very invested in us being particularly good at sports or focusing on athletic achievement. In the repetition of exercise I could simply blend into the blackness around me and I liked that.

Our aerobics instructor was named Wendy. She was small, sinewy, and racially ambiguous. Her hair was a blond afro with chestnut roots, her skin swarthy, and she had a roman nose. Wendy was fond of ’80s style aerobics gear: layers of tight fitting matchy matchy purples and pinks, down to the socks and wrist bands, her feet shod in Reeboks. Wendy always held back her Afro on one side with a decorative accessory. And Wendy was serious. She expected aerobic excellence and I am afraid none of us met her high expectations. There was no goal in aerobics. We were all young and therefore youthfully beautiful. Weight loss and toning were not of enough concern to feel the burn or eat less pizza or fries.

Concord Academy was a zone of female empowerment as well as a celebration of sensual beauty, so the weight obsession thing was less overwhelming there than in most places. Girls were remarkably embodied and emboldened at CA. There were no cookie cutters. Beautiful girls were everywhere. And not in that clichéd sense of carbon copy popular girls in a uniform, but this was beauty of the sort you saw in fashion magazines. Quirky, distinctive, unconventional, unapologetic. We were smart girls, talented girls, angst-ridden special girls. These were girls who did things like walk to Walden pond in cowboy boots and mini skirts, who smoked cigarettes beneath a gazebo wearing their bulky forest green letterman jackets, who had sex in the music rooms in the middle of the night while house parents slept. Okay, I never did any of those things. I was the straight and narrow for the most part, my adolescent desires short-circuited by a still nagging civil rights sensibility that my place there had some greater meaning to “the people.” I tentatively waded in membership over gossip with the girls who were tough and brilliant, and my role as senior class president. I made sure I belonged but couldn’t give myself over fully to the kind of intimacy I wanted to share with my peers.

In aerobics class, with slight smiles of amusement, we Black girls mimicked Wendy’s moves, afternoon after afternoon. I was frequently distracted from the choreography or “routine” by the soundtrack. One song in particular she played again and again: “You Make Me Feel, Mighty Real.” The voice was a strained falsetto, piercing and jubilant yet also slightly wounded. It was Sylvester.

The repetitive beats and the vocal reaching made Sylvester’s voice fit perfectly in the aerobics craze of the 1980s. The aerobics craze was an industry, whose commodities were VHS tapes and ridiculous attire. It was a hit, however, not just because there were so many things to buy, but because human beings like to feel their bodies working joyfully. We like the intersection of pleasure and pain. Sylvester’s voice possessed that. We moved, on beat, to the sound of that intersection.

At Concord Academy I was both in time and out of time. I was aware of my difference less from a sense of not belonging and more from a knowledge that there was a there out there which I only barely kept time to. I sought the rhythm of that other place I didn’t live or see every day in hip hop. I had a box, with headphones that could just barely be tuned to the late night hip hop shows at Emerson, Northeastern and Harvard. Night after night I stayed up late and listened in on the generation to which I belonged.

And thankfully, my local teenage socialite friend Judy Beth ushered me into the social world of prep school Black kids in Boston and the surrounding areas. We waited in breathless anticipation for NEALSA parties, New England Afro-Latino Student Association, an umbrella group for students of color at independent schools. It was a thrill. There would be dozens of boys, from gold to mahogany, smart boys who wore rugby shirts and whose voices didn’t crack when asking me out or if they did it was because they were nervous and not because I was black. The kids who lived in Roxbury and Dorchester, or boarding school students from the Bronx and Southeast DC taught the rest of us, by example, how to do the snake, the kick step, the running man, and generally how to maintain cultural relevance. A community of folks betwixt and between, in many different ways: that is who we were on those special evenings. We clung to each other and made a world within a world. We danced away feeling like outsiders, we slipped into the vernaculars we policed during the school day on our missions of uplift and aspiration, we laughed loud and hard.

Years later I would deliver a lecture to a conference of students of color at independent schools, and I called it finding the sweet in the bitter. We cannot detach the discomforting parts from the extraordinary gift of attending schools where the life of the mind was nurtured and opportunity shared. Bitter and sweet, pleasure and pain, eyes both transparent and glossy pitch, together.

- Imani Perry

Imani Perry is a Professor in the Center for African American Studies at Princeton University. She is a graduate of Cambridge Friends School in Cambridge, MA, and Concord Academy in Concord, MA. She received her BA from Yale College and her Ph.D. and J.D. from Harvard University. Many of her scholarly articles can be found on her website: www.imaniperry.com, and she is a Huffington Post blogger. You can follow Imani on twitter @imaniperry

Robin Wallace is Doctor of Oriental Medicine for Concentra New Mexico treating work injuries with Chinese Medicine and Acupuncture.  The competitive environments of Germantown Academy motivated her to value the quality of setting and meeting goals or as she now calls it, intention.

—

I had a wonderful education at Germantown Academy, pre-K through 12th!  I realized even then that I was experiencing an opportunity of stepping tools that efficiently would make my life easier, looking in one privileged window at a time. Conjugating the world ahead for I was armed with a variety of “windows”.

There was the Black-nod walking down the White hallways.  The only… on the school’s team or one of the other… in the classroom.  This awareness could only go two ways:  gratitude or resentment.  You never know until an opportunity such as Life throws you a curve.  It was how you responded which spoke volumes of your high school prep resume.

I can tell you that I turned out OK because I realize that every experience in my life is shaping me. I am available for knowledge; I can articulate the variety of Human experience.  In the end, I know that I am a Conscious Being having a human experience of multiple abilities extracting from an Infinite.

It was a Black experience, a Human experience.  Germantown Academy was another window into the soul of man.  Exposure is a gift that keeps on giving.  Stagnation, lack of, ignorance, doubt, and fear…. drifts further away as inward knowing answers everything.  Germantown Academy had a part in that and therefore I am grateful.

- Dr. Robin Wallace

—

At Germantown Friends School, I wasn’t the best student in a couple of areas, like the sciences and history, but I excelled in math and art. And depending on the year or the teacher, I loved English.

I laugh now when I think of how my college advisor told my parents that I should go to RISD (Rhode Island School of Design) because of my superior artistic talent, and my parents rebuffed thinking he was a racist. They thought he was advising that I attend a “trade school” instead of a regular university or college. Little did we know that RISD was like the “Harvard” of art schools and that he was right since I ended up at RISD to get my MFA.  I didn’t always appreciate or realize how fortunate I was to attend a private school until I left it.

- Kristin Haskins-Simms

(Kristin can be seen on Project Runway Season 8 – premieres Thursday, July 29, 2010 on Lifetime at 9pm et/pt.)

I attended Charlotte Catholic High School from 1968 to 1972. The youngest of seven children, I was the first to graduate from college. My father died when I was only 12 years old leaving my mother to provide for the family on a housekeeper’s wages. Courageously she went back to college taking night courses and earned her teaching degree. She instilled in me the value of a good education.

School segregation had not ended in the 1960′s and blacks often attended inferior schools. Being a teacher herself, mom pushed me to attend Charlotte Catholic High which opened its doors to a few black students. I remember riding the city bus across town on the first day of school. I pressed my face against the window as the scenes outside changed from poor neighborhoods on Charlotte’s Southside to storybook homes that I had only seen in books.

When the bus stopped at Charlotte Catholic, I walked slowly down the steps into a predominantly white world. Students moved about freely among manicured lawns and gardens on the way to classes.  In many ways I felt like I was in OZ.  We had our own library and labs with real microscopes that worked.  Classrooms were comfortably small with nuns and priests as teachers.  With our faith as a common denominator I slowly adapted to my new culture.

I kept to myself and wanted to prove I was academically equal.  It was tough going at first having come from a segregated middle school.  What inspired me the most was the caring and discipline displayed by the nuns cloaked in black habits that hid their hair.  They would pray while walking on the way to class or the lunch room or the athletic field.  Their dedication to prayer and lives of self-sacrifice instilled in me a desire to make the most of my gifts and talent. Besides, Catholic School was barely affordable for a single mother with many mouths to feed.  Earning an ‘A’ on each test, each essay and verbal quiz was my way of showing appreciation to my mother for her love and the sacrifice she was making for me. How could I do less?

After the initial year at CCHS I made more friends and soon was the popular kid at school.  I was inducted into the National Honor Society and elected senior class president.  The experience of being a prep school Negro led me to enroll at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.  At UNC I found a passion for journalism and joined Air Force ROTC.  Joining the U.S. Air Force was like another prep school environment and, even though I was a commissioned officer, I was still a prep school Negro.  From Texas to Alabama to Japan, I was usually one of only two officers of color assigned to military bases.

During my time in the Pentagon I was public affairs officer to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral William J. Crowe, a man of enormous compassion and intellect.  As a mentor he taught me the power of taking bold initiatives and enjoying life enough to laugh.  From 1989 to 1992 I was deputy publisher for the Pacific Stars and Stripes newspaper in Tokyo.  Later as the National Affairs Division Chief, I integrated marketing programs for public affairs offices in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles.

After 21 years of active duty I was selected for promotion to the rank of colonel.  I chose instead to transition to civilian life before returning to academia and Chapel Hill.  In addition to teaching classes, I’m also the director of the Chuck Stone Program for Diversity in Education and Media.  The program brings promising high school seniors of diversity together for a one-week writing workshop. The goal is to encourage students to be a voice for the underrepresented populations.

Thirty years after graduating from UNC the ranks of African American faculty remains disproportionate to the state’s overall black population.  I enter the classroom each fall and spring realizing that I may be the only black professor that many of the students will have during their four years at Carolina.  The prep school Negro lives on.

- Napoleon Byars

—

Imagine being in a world where everything happens for divine reason; time after time, I am reminded that my destiny is predetermined. That said, there’s no doubt in my mind that I have arrived at my present identity because of my experiences at Northfield Mount Hermon School (NMH).  With no thought of boarding institutions in mind, 7^th grade homeroom was interrupted by a pivotal moment, when my guidance counselor presented a prep school admissions video.  At that very moment I knew it was for me.

My parents and I made up our minds that attending high school outside of the New York City public school system would be the best choice for my education.  My mother was very adamant in managing the necessary legwork in order to successfully complete the application and interview process.  Despite an array of choices, my decision to visit NMH came with ease.  The welcoming environment made the offer to attend impossible to refuse.

Accepting my enrollment at NMH as a blessing imparted by grace and circumstance, I arrived in Northfield, MA open to absorb a new world but ignorant to the magnitude by which this place would shape me.  To navigate a space where almost every value and preconceived notion is challenged on a daily basis, proved to be an empowering and deeply stabilizing experience.

Aside from bearing the title of minority in skin color and familial background, to identify as the minority in social capital and positive influence, is where I credit the emphasis of my growth in high school.  In the beginning, I was indeed exposed to the varied racial encounters that occur at majority institutions, but was blind to how it really affected me.  It was not until my junior year that I understood how to teach others around me the appropriate way to react to “difference.”  

We had to help each other understand the complexities of our identities as citizens and furthermore, as a collection of perspectives living, growing, and learning in such close proximity to one another.  Granted, at the time I was in fact perturbed about my seemingly uncompensated teaching position, but in retrospect, I couldn’t be more grateful for enduring, and thus claiming, the responsibility.

Northfield Mount Hermon School set me on an irrevocable journey of self-discovery that has uncovered other invaluable endeavors, namely, attending Dartmouth College. Now I understand what four years of adolescence between the trees really did for my pursuit of excellence. Proud and ever evolving, I am a “Prep School Negro”.

- Ayana Christie
Candidate for B.A. 2011 | English Major
Dartmouth College

In his essay below published in 1988 during his third year at Stanford, a young Mabry captures the essence of what it meant for him to be a PSN.

—

“Living in Two Worlds” by Marcus Mabry
Newsweek on Campus, April 1988

A round, green cardboard sign hangs from a string proclaiming, “We built a proud new feeling,” the slogan of a local supermarket. It is a souvenir from one of my brother’s last jobs. In addition to being a bagger, he’s worked at a fast-food restaurant, a gas station, a garage and a textile factory. Now, in the icy clutches of the Northeastern winter, he is unemployed. He will soon be a father. He is 19 years old.

In mid-December I was at Stanford, among the palm trees and weighty chores of academe. And all I wanted to do was get out. I joined the rest of the undergrads in a chorus of excitement, singing the praises of Christmas break. No classes, no midterms, no finals . . . and no freshmen! (I’m a resident assistant.) Awesome! I was looking forward to escaping. I never gave a thought to what I was escaping to.

Once I got home to New Jersey, reality returned. My dreaded freshmen had been replaced by unemployed relatives; badgering professors had been replaced by hard-working single mothers, and cold classrooms by dilapidated bedrooms and kitchens. The room in which the “proud new feeling” sign hung contained the belongings of myself, my mom and my brother. But for these two weeks it was mine. They slept downstairs on couches.

Most students who travel between the universes of poverty and affluence during breaks experience similar conditions, as well as the guilt, the helplessness and, sometimes, the embarrassment associated with them. Our friends are willing to listen, but most of them are unable to imagine the pain of the impoverished lives that we see every six months. Each time I return home I feel further away from the realities of poverty in America and more ashamed that they are allowed to persist. What frightens me most is not that the American socioeconomic system permits poverty to continue, but that by participating in that system I share some of the blame.

Last year I lived in an on-campus apartment, with a (relatively) modern bathroom, kitchen and two bedrooms. Using summer earnings, I added some expensive prints, a potted palm and some other plants, making the place look like the more-than-humble abode of a New York City Yuppie. I gave dinner parties, even a soirée française.

For my roommate, a doctor’s son, this kind of life was nothing extraordinary.  But my mom was struggling to provide a life for herself and my brother. In addition to working 24-hour-a-day cases as a practical nurse, she was trying to ensure that my brother would graduate from high school and have a decent life. She knew that she had to compete for his attention with drugs and other potentially dangerous things that can look attractive to a young man when he sees no better future.

Living in my grandmother’s house this Christmas break restored all the forgotten, and the never acknowledged, guilt. I had gone to boarding school on a full scholarship since the ninth grade, so being away from poverty was not new.

But my own growing affluence has increased my distance. My friends say that I should not feel guilty: what could I do substantially for my family at this age, they ask. Even though I know that education is the right thing to do, I can’t help but feel, sometimes, that I have it too good. There is no reason that I deserve security and warmth, while my brother has to cope with potential unemployment and prejudice. I, too, encounter prejudice, but it is softened by my status as a student in an affluent and intellectual community.

More than my sense of guilt, my sense of helplessness increases each time I return home. As my success leads me further away for longer periods of time, poverty becomes harder to conceptualize and feels that much more oppressive when I visit with it. The first night of break, I lay in our bedroom, on a couch that let out into a bed that took up the whole room, except for a space heater. It was a little hard to sleep because the springs from the couch stuck through at inconvenient spots. But it would have been impossible to sleep anyway because of the groans coming from my grandmother’s room next door. Only in her early 60s, she suffers from many chronic diseases and couldn’t help but moan, then pray aloud, then moan, then pray aloud.

Not very festive: This wrenching of my heart was interrupted by the 3 a.m. entry of a relative who had been allowed to stay at the house despite rowdy behavior and threats toward the family in the past. As he came into the house, he slammed the door, and his heavy steps shook the second floor as he stomped into my grandmother’s room to take his place, at the foot of her bed. There he slept, without blankets on a bare mattress. This was the first night. Later in the vacation, a Christmas turkey and a Christmas ham were stolen from my aunt’s refrigerator on Christmas Eve. We think the thief was a relative. My mom and I decided not to exchange gifts that year because it just didn’t seem festive.

A few days after New Year’s I returned to California. The Northeast was soon hit by a blizzard. They were there, and I was here. That was the way it had to be, for now. I haven’t forgotten; the ache of knowing their suffering is always there.  It has to be kept deep down, or I can’t find the logic in studying and partying while people, my people, are being killed by poverty. Ironically, success drives me away from those I most want to help by getting an education.

Somewhere in the midst of all that misery, my family has built, within me, “a proud feeling.” As I travel between the two worlds it becomes harder to remember just how proud I should be — not just because of where I have come from and where I am going, but because of where they are. The fact that they survive in the world in which they live is something to be very proud of, indeed. It inspires within me a sense of tenacity and accomplishment that I hope every college graduate will someday possess.

***

[photo credit: book cover of "White Bucks and Black-eyed Peas: Coming of Age Black in White America" (Scribners, 1995; Modern Times/Rodale, 2008)]