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.

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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

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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

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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.

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“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)]

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I was among the second group of Community Scholars to enter Germantown Friends School in 1966. Recruited from my sixth grade class in a public school in West Oak Lane, which was rapidly transitioning from an integrated to a black neighborhood.  In a period when much of the US was still segregated and no one in my family had gone to college, my parents immediately recognized the opportunity to go GFS as potentially transformative. For me, it was the beginning of life in two worlds.

At that time the civil rights movement was in full swing and the goal of many was equality.  For much of the white progressive community, that meant the eradication of difference. As a result, when I entered GFS I was told by my counselor, “Don’t tell anyone you are on scholarship. They will treat you differently.” Or essentially, live a lie.

For me, a kid who was also struggling with the fact that he was gay, that appeared initially to be an important strategy. Little did I know, that on both counts anyone who cared to think about my circumstance could see through me.  This strategy, while understood by my family, ultimately served as a source of constant tension because it shaped my social interactions. The notion that I thought I was “better than” was a constant source of conflict and shame. It served to compound my isolation through much of my teens. Now I know that isolation defines the lives of many teens, particularly gay teens. At that time, there was no place to talk about it.

However, I also recognized there were aspects of who I was that distinguished me. From a very early age I exhibited unusual artistic talents that were inherited from my mother.  Equally talented, she was discouraged from pursuing a career in the arts because she was told, “there are no colored women artists.”  As a result, she became a beautician and channeled her talents into an interest in fashion and design. The fact that GFS had one of the strongest art departments in the city and one that quickly recognized and embraced my talents made my mother deeply appreciative. It also made me at home in ways that some of the other community scholars never really were.

At GFS, there was pervasive respect for artists and the creative process as a part of the individual’s cultural and intellectual life.  There was also a belief in one’s essential responsibility to do service in ways that improves the world we occupy.  From early in my career, I have recognized that the work I wanted to do would balance creativity, service and analysis, all activities that I learned to value in the contexts of home and school. While the course of my career has been somewhat circuitous and unpredictable, ranging from the arts to government to education, those activities have always been present.

At this point, I am very happy that Germantown Friends School was a part of my life.  I recognize its impact on the set of values that govern my life and the degree to which living in two worlds at such a young age gave me an understanding of the complexity and contradictions of one’s lived experience. I am reminded daily that variants of that complexity characterize the lives we all lead.

My new position at Parsons as the Associate Dean for Civic Engagement will depend on maintaining a level of comfort with and insight into such multidimensional experience.  Largely, the position revolves around envisioning an educational institution in a variety of changing and often conflicting environments, while managing and nurturing their relationship to the diversity within the institution itself.  It’s a big challenge but one that excites me in a way that I recognize is a response, in part, to my prep school experience.

I must also add that I am amazed that after four decades, out of classes of 80 students, there is a diverse group of more than two dozen with whom I have ongoing friendships.  I think that is very cool and unusual.  I’m lucky.

- Tony Whitfield

www.tonywhitfield.com

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Poly Prep Country Day School (Brooklyn, NY) on the surface was an academic paradise.  Teachers were immensely knowledgeable and cared more about genuine learning rather than standardized tests.  The school provided its students with every opportunity to participate in any sport and activity at an extremely high level.  However, for many of the school’s few minority students, there was a much more troubling story when looked at more closely.

At Poly, I was often ashamed of my upbringing and the neighborhood where I was born. I feared that my peers would see me as the “Affirmative Action Admit”.  I opted out of the football weekend carpool so that no one would see where I lived.  I often used the money that my parents had given me for breakfast and lunch to buy sneakers.  I even borrowed clothes from friends to create the illusion of a more extensive wardrobe. I minimized my athletic accomplishments so that others would not view me as the typical jock.

In my neighborhood, peers often ridiculed me because I valued my education.  I battled the ‘nerd’ image that others castigated upon me by publicly denigrating the value of an education while I secretly did my homework.  I told my peers that I only attended my school because of its athletic reputation and not for the quality education that it provided.  I essentially had three personalities, “Student Naheem”, “Neighborhood Naheem” and myself; and it hurt that I spent a majority of the day not being myself.

I was forced to become a different person at home than I was at school.  For example, in my neighborhood I needed to be resolute to avoid the pitfalls that many talented people from similar upbringings had fallen.  In school, I needed to be resolute because I often dealt with people who felt that I did not belong. Being resolute in the Canarsie section of Brooklyn was not the same as being resolute within the confines of Poly Prep.  One situation may have called for me to defend myself loudly, while the other would have required my quiet strength to ignore an inappropriate comment.  Though I needed to use the same character trait in both environments, that trait assumed a different meaning in the context of the environment.  Regardless of the scale of the shift between “personalities”, it was painful to feel that I was constantly not being true to myself.

Eventually I became comfortable at Poly.  The intellectual curiosity that Poly breeds forces students to value each other for their opinions and backgrounds rather than to tease them.  Poly taught me that I should value my experiences because they helped to create the person that I am today.  Without Poly, I am sure that I would not have been as successful as I currently am.

- Naheem Harris

Information Manager,
NYC Department of Small Business Services

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I was raised in the Germantown section of Philadelphia where I attended Greene Street Friends School from K -8^th grades and Germantown Friends High School.  I grew up on a block in Germantown surrounded by my parents and extended family, many of who settled in Philadelphia from Puerto Rico.  My parents sacrificed personally for many years in order to be able to send me to the prestigious friends schools and provide me with an opportunity they were never afforded growing up.

I remember being reminded daily of how fortunate I was to attend Germantown Friends.  A European choir trip, choir camp, basketball camp, a trip to Puerto Rico with my Spanish class and a month in Spain for my Junior project were experiences that shaped my vision of the world.  I understood that these experiences were uniquely mine as a result of attending a private school.  I was also really aware of the lack of opportunity for those that did not attend my school.  I remember early on wanting to show young people, who shared my family’s background, what I considered to be “the other side” – a world where education is valued above all else and all things seemed possible.

While I was fortunate to attend GFS, it was the first time I encountered the struggle of juggling two worlds.  At GFS I learned to present a restrained adaptation of myself in an attempt to fly under the radar and survive in a world that was so different and foreign from my “real” family life.  The academic foundation I built at GFS made my transition to Hofstra University in New York City seamless, allowing me the freedom to explore more social and cultural interests.  I appreciated the chance to socialize with students of diverse cultural and socio-economic backgrounds. I was a confident and proficient college student as a result of my private school education.  I also found myself comfortable in a variety of social circles as a result of spending my childhood and adolescence at private schools.

Since graduating college I have worked in the mental health field in urban communities of color in New York and Philadelphia.  I spent the last 5 years as a college counselor working with high school students who will be 1^st generation college students. Recently I completed my Masters Degree in School Counseling at The University of Pennsylvania and have now transitioned into the role of High School Counselor for the Philadelphia School.  I have the privilege of working at a neighborhood public school for all girls in North Philadelphia.  The passion that drives my work was born at GFS, where I learned about “the other side”.  I saw first-hand how limitless the world could be if I settled for nothing less than the best possible education.  I work every day to try to sell that same idea.  I try to open the doors to higher education for young girls who have yet to realize their potential; same potential I realized as a result of my family’s work ethic and my private school education.

- Sonia Szymanski

http://www.thegrio.com/video/black-prep-school-students-balancing-two-lives-for-a-better-future.php

Attending a school like GFS (Germantown Friends School) was an eye opening experience for me.  Being a lifer allowed me to feel as if I belonged a lot more then many other minorities.  However, my personal experiences away from GFS represented a constant struggle to figure out exactly what it meant to still be African American while spending most of my time in a world where I was one of a few.  I’m not sure I fully understood that balance and had a complete appreciation of GFS until many years after leaving.

- Bill A. Anderson

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Since taking on his first full time radio slot one year after graduating as a member of the Dean’s List of Academic Achievement at George Washington University, Bill has constantly progressed and been recognized for his growth.  He has become not only a respected voice of Philadelphia but also a member of Philadelphia’s political movers and shakers.

Bill has been recognized by Congressman Chaka Fattah as one of the “Men Making a Difference” and has been noted as one of “Philadelphia’s Most Influential African Americans.”  He has also been a member of Mayor John Street’s inaugural transition team, listed as one of The Philadelphia Tribune’s “People to watch under 40″, been commended by Gov. Tom Ridge and recognized by Philadelphia Weekly Newspaper as “The Best Radio Talker.”

http://billandersonradio.com/