Andrew Gumbel - Wont Lose This Dream

WONT LOSE THIS DREAM

ALSO BY ANDREW GUMBEL

Down for the Count: Dirty Elections and the Rotten History of Democracy in America

Oklahoma City: What the Investigation Missedand Why It Still Matters

WONT LOSE THIS DREAM

How an Upstart Urban University Rewrote the Rules of a Broken System

ANDREW GUMBEL

To the students of Georgia Statethe ones who made it when the odds were stacked against them and the ones who havent, yet.

Our nation cannot afford to waste the human talent, the cultural and social richness, represented by those currently underrepresented in our society. If we do not create a nation that mobilizes the talents of all our citizens, we are destined for a diminished role in the global community and increased social turbulence. Most tragically, we will have failed to fulfill the promise of democracy upon which this nation was founded.

James J. Duderstadt, A University for the 21st Century

We must view the movement to transform our schools as just as vital to our twenty-first century humanity as the civil rights movement was to our twentieth-century humanity. That is how we must approach our investment in the future. That is how we must demonstrate our love for young people and their creative capacities.

Grace Lee Boggs, The Next American Revolution

CONTENTS

WONT LOSE THIS DREAM

INTRODUCTION:
THE DIFFERENCE WITH THOSE HARVARD KIDS

W here Princeton Nelson came from, a college education wasnt just at the outer edges of possibility, it was beyond imagination. Yet here he was, a proud member of the class of 2018 at Georgia State University, a computer science major with a cap and gown and a more than respectable 3.3 GPA, taking his place at a crowded indoor commencement ceremony along with the Atlanta Fife Band and professors in gowns of many colors and a cascade of balloons in Panther blue and white that tumbled from the ceiling like confetti.

He, too, got to shake hands with the university president, Mark Becker, whose welcoming remarks had invoked the magical power of thinking big. He, too, got to hug his fellow graduates, many of them seven or eight years younger than him, many sporting homemade slogans on their caps thanking God, or their mothers, or joking that the tassel was worth the hassle. He, too, could bask in the pride of his relatives, none more amazed or delighted than the grandmother who had thrown him out as a teenager because hed been too unruly to handle, or the aunt who had thrown him out all over again as a young adult because she didnt like the company he was keeping.

Nelson came from nothing, and he understood at an early age that it would be up to him to carve a path to something better, because nobody else was going to do it for him. Even when he slippedand he slipped a lothe knew the choices he made could mean the difference between life and death. He was born in an Iowa prison, the child of two parents convicted of drug dealing at the height of the crack cocaine epidemic, and within days he was in foster care, along with three older siblings. His mother stayed behind bars until he was three, and his father remained so conspicuously absent that Nelson didnt learn his name until the age of fourteen. Mostly, he was raised by his grandmother, Loretta, who brought all four children home and did her best to raise them on an assembly workers salary in a small red house in suburban Chicago.

Nelsons mother was in no state to take him even when she got out of prison. She fell back into the drug underworld and, months after her release, was found shot to death in an abandoned building on Chicagos South Side. Nelson remembers seeing her body laid in an open casket at the funeral and remembers, too, how everyone looked at him, the poor homeless child with no mom or dad. I dont think mom is going to wake up, he whispered to an uncle. And in that moment he intuited that his childhood, his age of innocence and wide-eyed wonder, was over already.

Loretta moved Princeton and his siblings to Atlanta for a fresh start, but there was little she could do to make up for what he had lostor never had. By sixth grade, he was attending an institution for children with severe emotional and behavioral problems. By tenth grade, his grandmother found him so unruly she sent him to live with his older brother, now back in Chicago, where he was soon running with gang members and carrying a pistol to class in his school bag. Nelsons saving grace was that he was a good student, but his natural intelligence never offered more than a temporary reprieve from the storm raging in his head. Back in Atlanta, he was caught smoking weed in a high school bathroom and arrested, the first of three occasions during his wild teenage years when he wound up in police custody and Loretta had to bail him out. His grades yo-yoed, he bounced in and out of special schools, and he barely graduated high school.

Turning himself around was a long and painful process. For years, he worked in warehouses and smoked weed and gave little thought to where his life was going. Still, he hated the feeling that he was a disappointment to his grandmother. He could never quite forget how his brother in Chicago had told him he was smart enough for college, so he signed himself up at Atlanta Technical College, thinking at first that hed train to be a barber. Then it dawned on him that as long as he was taking out loans hed be better off working toward an academic degree, not just a trade qualification. As it happened, there was a community college, Atlanta Metropolitan, right across the street, and he wandered over one day to enroll as a music major. Hed always enjoyed creating music beats on his grandmothers computer. Why not see where it could take him?

As he stood in line to register, he noticed a chart listing the professional fields expected to be most in demand in the Atlanta area by 2020, and his eyes fell on the words computer science. What did I have next to me in my grandmothers house this whole time? he said. A computer! It wasnt just music beats that hed created. Hed also worked on MySpace pages and video games, never thinking there could be a future in it. But now, apparently, there was. It was a flash of light, he said, Im thinking, Im a computer science major. Thats my calling.

Nelsons grades were strong enough to earn him an associates degree in computer science in two years. But his life, like that of almost every lower-income college student, remained precarious at best, a constant battle for time and money. When his aunt and uncle bought the house where he and his grandmother were living, one of the first things they did was evict him, saying they were concerned about his pot use and the shortcuts they suspected he was taking to make ends meet. They didnt do it the gentle way, either. A sheriffs deputy rapped at the door one morning and ordered Nelson to grab his things right away.

Before he could think of pursuing his studies further, he had to deal with the realities of homelessness. For two weeks he slept on the concrete floor of a bus station so he could bump up his savings from a job flipping burgers and buy himself a car. Once he had his Volkswagen Jetta, he signed on as an Uber driver. Soon he had a third job, as a security guard. Three days a week he stayed in a hotel to enjoy a bed and a hot shower; the other four days he parked overnight at a twenty-four-hour gas station or outside a Krogers supermarket where the lights and security cameras made it less likely hed be robbed, or worse.