Best-selling author Nathan McCall speaks at BHCC

Yawu Miller

Knowledge is power.

Author and journalist Nathan McCall told a crowd of 400 at Bunker Hill Community College recently that once he too was enrolled in college, a young man from a good, two-parent family. But he said, “I blew it and ended up in prison. And any of you can be tripped up as I was some time ago because I was lost, confused and unprepared.”

As a boy, McCall said, he looked around at the men in his neighborhood and couldn’t see any future for himself. “Everybody was unemployed or employed at the whim of white people. I gave up on the future because I didn’t think I had one.”

“At 19 I had a gun, and did what I thought was the ‘manly’ thing: I shot a guy who was disrespecting my girlfriend.”

One crime led to another until he finally was sentenced to 12 years in prison. There, like so many other young black men, McCall said he “came alive intellectually.” He took Dr. Felix Okoye’s words to heart: “It would be better not to know so many things than to know so many things that are not so,” and designed his own education. He immersed himself in everything from anthropology to “Native Son” author Richard Wright and sociologist W.E. B. DuBois; and all the while he read and wrote constantly.

“I used the mental exercise I did in prison to learn to think critically. That’s when I really began to learn that I had to start with myself. I had to learn I really had problems with my own thinking. Before I thought I was ‘bad,’ you know what I mean; instead, I was just being a chump.”

McCall told the students in his audience that becoming a real man, like his own hard working stepfather, has nothing to do with the “Get Rich or Die Tryin’” values dictated by rap star 50 Cent. “If you’re going out there on the corner hangin’ with your crew, then trouble will present itself,” he said.

“Reality was, when I was out hangin’ with my crew, I wasn’t even controlling my own thinking. And when you can control what a man will think, you don’t have to control what he will do,” that’s what educator Carter G. Woodson once wrote.” Woodson is often known as “The Father of Black History.”

“In prison I got some clarity. When I got out, I went back to college. I didn’t care what anybody thought. I had no clothes; first month in college I wore my prison brogans (shoes) to school, but I built up my intellect. That led to self esteem and a change in my behavior.

A few years later, while working as a reporter at The Washington Post, McCall left D.C. and went back to his hometown. “I saw the same guys still there, still doing the same things, and I knew I had to write about it. It became my first book: “Makes Me Wanna Holler: A Young Black Man in America.” That book became both a New York Times bestseller and BlackBoard magazine “Book of the Year.” McCall now teaches at Emory University and is at work on another book.

“I’m here to tell you knowledge is power,” he told the diverse audience that included everyone from BHCC students, faculty and staff to Charlestown senior citizens and a high school group from Providence, Rhode Island. McCall reminded the young people that even rap stars such as Master P. and P. Diddy, (“or whatever he’s calling himself these days”) went to college, and now earn hundreds of millions of dollars. McCall might have chosen a different career path, but after his “Compelling Conversation,” young fans mobbed him like a rap star.

Season two of BHCC’s “Compelling Conversations” speaker series continues on Thursday, February 9, 2006 with “Nickel and Dimed” author and social critic Barbara Ehrenreich. PBS NewsHour anchor and reporter Ray Suarez speaks on April 13, 2006. All Compelling Conversations lectures, book signings and receptions are free and open to the public.

Bunker Hill Community College enrolls more than 7,800 students on two campuses and five satellite centers. It is one of the largest and most diverse institutions of higher education in Massachusetts. Six of ten BHCC students are people of color, and more than half are women. BHCC’s hundreds of international students come from more than 90 countries; some 75 different languages may be heard on campus.